Amazon SimpleDB vs. Neo4j

Well suited for: Games, Chat rooms, real time software like corporate events, marathons and so. Anytime and anywhere you could use a NoSQL DB you should think of SimpleDB.

As an arduous AWS user, Amazon SimpleDB easily integrates with EC2 and other AWS module; and if you are not an AWS user, you also have a fantastic tool that will solve the problem for which you are focused.

Incentivized

Its very well suited for storing graph types relationship information, such as a group of people and their relationships. Data modeling this sort of information in a traditional SQL database is a pain and inefficient. Using Neo4J allows for efficient modeling of data while providing rich querying capabilities using Cypher. Its also a great fit for any programming language because of its support for REST API. It's less appropriate for any other data structure other than Graph data. So as with any DB, evaluate the data structure and query and if the querying revolves around relationships, then Neo4J is a fit. If there is more need for looking up individual nodes and their associated information, Neo4J might not be the most efficient solution in the market.

Incentivized

• Flexibility
• Easy to learn and use
• AWS integration

Incentivized

• When joins are a common in a relational store, switching to Neo4j is better
• When pattern matching and surfacing interesting insights is the goal, neo4j's cypher is pretty powerful
• When schema is not completely known beforehand and needs to be evolved with time

Incentivized

• Non AWS environments
• Strict storage limit (but well we have DynamoDB for storage issues)

Incentivized

• We felt we could only scale easily vertically
• We felt limited by Neo4j's hosted machine options
• Limited constraints to enforce relational patterns

Incentivized

Learning cypher was super easy coming from a SQL background. Furthermore, the docs Neo4j provides on their website make it really easy to pull up a reference, guide or a quick example. The mac app they provide is also really well designed with good visualisation tools, with the ability to easily use colour, line thickness etc to help navigate your data.

Incentivized

It integrates beautifully with AWS. In some projects we use SimpleDB while we use DynamoDB for others, according to the characteristics of the project. If the infrastructure is AWS, we always think of one of them.

Incentivized

I have not used anything like Neo4J because of how unique it is in the work that it allows me to do. I am not aware of any other graph database platforms and it might be because it is a growing area (especially in the world of pharmaceuticals). I would be open to trying other softwares though.

Incentivized

• Reduced database administration time
• Reduced data model analysis time
• Lower cost of resources in projects in general

Incentivized

• For experimentation purposes, it had a positive impact on my company. It was very natural to work with Neo4j and so intuitive to visualize the data.
• Neo4j community edition is free, which is what we experimented on. So there was no investment up front apart from employee's time. But this quickly gave results and it was time well spent.
• Neo4j is a cool but very new technology. It was hard to have people onboard, especially some of the leadership and relational folks.

Incentivized