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
PostgreSQL
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
PostgreSQL (alternately Postgres) is a free and open source object-relational database system boasting over 30 years of active development, reliability, feature robustness, and performance. It supports SQL and is designed to support various workloads flexibly.
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.
PostgreSQL is ideal for handling databases that contain large volumes of information due to its efficiency, speed and above all because of the good management it makes of our resources, it also behaves very well in distributed environments of high demand, if you want a database of stable data and excellent performance PostgreSQL is one of the best.
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.
The performance of PostgreSQL has been enhanced through the years, but always is better to have as much performance as we can.
The replication services could be done directly within the database, and more easily.
The Object Orientation of the Database could be extended, and albeit it manages inheritance of tables, and accepts XML and JSON as primary types, it would be wonderful if one could attach methods more easily to tables (to make them more like classes), and instances (rows for example).
Postgresql is the best tool out there for relational data so I have to give it a high rating when it comes to analytics, data availability and consistency, so on and so forth. SQL is also a relatively consistent language so when it comes to building new tables and loading data in from the OLTP database, there are enough tools where we can perform ETL on a scalable basis.
The data queries are relatively quick for a small to medium sized table. With complex joins, and a wide and deep table however, the performance of the query has room for improvement.
AWS, Heroku, and Digital Ocean all provide Postgres-as-a-service, where you pretty much never need to administrate it yourself but they do it for you. The Postgres community also has developed awesome and reasonably priced extensions, such as Citus DB and CockroachDB in case you need additional support for running it. If you need documentation, Postgres's docs are super thorough and their official forms are active.
The online training is request based. Had there been recorded videos available online for potential users to benefit from, I could have rated it higher. The online documentation however is very helpful. The online documentation PDF is downloadable and allows users to pace their own learning. With examples and code snippets, the documentation is great starting point.
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.
In this case, Postgres is preferred because it handles large data sets and requires fewer hardware resources than its competitor, MySQL. Compared to PostgreSQL, Microsoft products are excellent, but the installation process for MS SQL is lengthy. PostgreSQL has an advantage over its competitors in that it can adapt or configure third-party programs, applications, or settings.
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.
Easy to administer so our DevOps team has only ever used minimal time to setup, tune, and maintain.
Easy to interface with so our Engineering team has only ever used minimal time to query or modify the database. Getting the data is straightforward, what we do with it is the bigger concern.
