It is cost-effective, maintenance-free, easy to deploy and use on Linux and Windows environments and it works steadily. It has an open-source license. Installing Oracle was quite difficult in comparison to Firebird.
It came a time when the practice of SQLite was lagging behind and of course, we were looking at the cost that was being involved and so Firebird made the breakthrough for us from both. It has an open-source license and it is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux environments.
As you know, the version of an application is very good for a period in the world of information technologies, it is the first in the performance / cost table. But some periods come and that practice lags behind. When Firebird made such a breakthrough, we preferred this …
Back then I evaluated Oracle 8, IBM DB2, Mimer, SAP DB, MySQL, Borland Interbase (not Embarcadero Interbase and that one has the same roots as Firebird) and most likely other RDBMS. Firebird was free, usage was ok, it was (for my application) maintenance free and speed was ok …
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 …
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 …
Neo4j is ahead of any of the leading competitors I know. The only one which comes close, in my opinion, is the "Titan-Distributed Graph Database" which is completely open source and free to use. Titan works on top of Apache Cassandra so it has some huge learning curves to do, …
We've done some BOE comparisons between Neo4j, Titan, and OrientDB. The general consensus was that Titan is too unweildy and that Neo4j beat out OrientDB by being more active and having a large community.
When looking for low maintenance and a solution suited for all kinds of pc applications. It is great when you are looking to store physical files in folder locations and you can then reference the document in the database. It has an open-source community around it along with documentation for third-party drivers of the development environment.
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.
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.
Usability has improved by unifying the architecture. The only thing's missing out of the box is a simple GUI DB tool for viewing DB contents and maybe running some SQL queries.
It is cost-effective, maintenance-free, easy to deploy and use on Linux and Windows environments and it works steadily. It has an open-source license. Installing Oracle was quite difficult in comparison to Firebird.
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.
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.