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by master_shake 4126 days ago
I could not disagree more. Neo4j has got to be the most intuitive, simplistic database structure on earth. The php client is amazingly optimized, even for super small datasets, it murders sql. The graph visiualizer is beautiful and extremely helpful. I might even argue that it has better documentation than SQL because it's all in one place with instructional videos and tutorials. If you live in silicon valley, you can go to their office for "office hours" and they give you pizza and beer and teach you how to use it. It so simple and easy to use a child could do it.
2 comments

Simple and easy is not really what I'm looking for in a database. I mean sure those are nice, but they are orthogonal to the important issues, which I'll loosely classify as power. A lot of people flocked to MongoDB based on the promise of ease-of-use plus scalability, but then realized there's no free lunch, and actually learning SQL was a small price to pay for the power of modern RDBMSes. They partied hard with their schema-less designs, pushing code faster than anyone ever thought possible, right up until they learned the purpose and value of data integrity.

This is not to say that Neo4j is just an overhyped fad DB, but saying that the structure is "intuitive [and] simplistic" is not confidence inspiring.

Last time I used Neo4j in production with NodeJS we had only a few thousand nodes, and our heaviest query, which equated to a 2-table-join sql query, took up to 3 seconds to complete. We abandoned it and went with postgres...