The InfluxDB is a time series database from InfluxData headquartered in San Francisco. As an observability solution, it is designed to provide real-time visibility into stacks, sensors and systems. It is available open source, via the Cloud as a DBaaS option, or through an Enterprise subscription.
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Neo4j
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Neo4j is an open source embeddable graph database developed by Neo Technologies based in San Mateo, California with an office in Sweden.
InfluxDB is very good at storing monitoring metrics (e.g. performance data). InfluxDB is not the right choice if you need to store other data types (like plain text, data relations etc.).
Neo4J is great for creating network graphs or illustrating how things are related. It is also good for finding individuals or things that have greater influence than others in a system. It is not appropriate if you have standard data sets that can be analyzed using conventional methods or visualized using Tableau, for example.
Mature Query language, I found Cypher QL to be mature in handling all sorts of problems we throw at it. Its expressive enough to be intuitive while providing rich features for various scenarios.
Native support for REST API, that makes interacting with Neo4J intuitive and easy.
Support for Procedures in Java, procedures are custom code that could be added to the Neo4J to write custom querying of data. The best part about the procedures is it could be invoked using the REST API. This allows us to overcome any shortcomings from their Cypher query language.
Nice UI and interface for executing the Query and visualizing the response.
UI access controlled by User credentials allows for neat access controls.
Awesome free community edition for small-scale projects.
One of the hardest challenges that Neo4j had to solve was the horizontal scaling problem. I am not updated on recent developments, but at the time of my use, I couldn't find a viable solution.
Neo4j does not play with other open source APIs like Blueprint. You have to use the native Neo4j API.
There wasn't a visual tool to see your data. Of course, third party tools are always available, but I would have loved something which came with the Neo4j bundle. I love that Docker comes bundled with Kitematic, so it's not wrong to hope that Neo4j could also ship with some default visualization software.
InfluxDB is a near perfect product for time series database engines. The relatively small list of cons are heavily outweighed by it's ability to just work and be a very flexible and powerful database engine. The community and support provided by the corporation are the only areas I have little experience.
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.
We have worked with the InfluxDB support team a few times so far and it has been positive. Issues submitted are worked on promptly and we have good feedback.
To be honest, I didn't look at alternatives since InfluxDB performs very well if you can oversee the lack of security and HA features. But for all challenges, there is an easy solution which brings you forward (e.g. read load balancing can be achieved by using a common HTTPS load balancer).
Neo4j is a graph store and has different use cases compared to another NoSQL Document store like MongoDB. MongoDB is a bad choice when joins are common as existing operators for joining two documents (similar to tables in a relational store) as Mongo 3.5 use SQL like join algorithms which are expensive. MongoDB is a great choice when distributed schemaless rich document structures are important requirements. Cross document transaction support is not native to MongoDB yet, whereas Neo4J is ACID complaint with all its operations.
