Neo4j is an open source embeddable graph database developed by Neo Technologies based in San Mateo, California with an office in Sweden.
$65
per month
Progress OpenEdge
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Progress OpenEdge is an application development environment to keep businesses running, that enables users to leverage technology advancements to more quickly deliver business applications.
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.
Openedge is very well suited for financial based applications for 2 reasons. First, it has very powerful transaction scoping that will commit or back out of all changes in a transaction at once. This ensure that your data is "in sync." Second, it offers after imaging roll forward and replication for environments that require high availability or powerful disaster recovery in place.
Openedge databases are practically bulletproof, even when shot down abnormally. The offer complete transaction scoping, before imagining, and also after imaging for roll foward capability.
Openedge has a very powerful and easy to learn 4GL programming language that can be used in a traditional or object oriented manner.
Openedge also has powerful web services components, fully integrating both SOAP and RESTful web services.
Openedge is completely scaleable from 1 user to a fully distributed global enterprise solution.
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.
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.
The decision to use openedge with our particular product was made such a long time ago that I certainly was not around to make the decision. And most of the other products that would have been compared at the time are likely no longer around. Which does speak to the longevity and benefits of this product. When you look back and see how long the same product has been going forward with constant improvements and remaining relevant without major disruptive changes, it is worthy of some credit.
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.
