IBM IMS vs. Neo4j

We have built a database of a network of bank branches with all the needs of security and recovery/restart. It requires knowledge of obsolete maintenance languages and perhaps it is too rigid in the schemes.

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

• Security
• Reliability
• Big volume of data and good performance

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

• Certainly, not being a DB relational penalizes its use
• It should be more flexible
• Open up to more recent languages

Incentivized

• It would be nice to have some concept of namespaces, or some way of roughly making a single instance multi-tenant. It'd be nice to make sandboxing easier.
• Automatic backups could be improved.

Incentivized

[Based on] Query Language, Performance on small and large data sets, integration and deployment, analysis, API support, Interactive UI.

Incentivized

Essentially, for a question of reliability and scalability, the performance has always been of an enterprise level. The utilities are efficient and effective.

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

• The investment made about 20 years ago that has been fully repaid
• Reliability and security of investments
• Unfortunately, it is quite outdated and therefore maintenance costs are higher because the skills are not always available.

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