When I see articles like this I think back to Neo4j, when we adopted the product the enterprise features were open source, which turned out to be a long con bait and switch, enterprise features are now closed. We rewrote our app using another DB and are closely watching more recent entries into the GraphDB space such as Agensgraph ( a new apache project) built atop postgres.
I discovered that there is a fork of a previous Neo4j enterprise version known as ONgDB. Don't know if it will have a sufficient pool of maintainers to fix and make evolve such a product. But at least it remains fully open source.(Neo4J enterprise version open source code has been removed..)
I hope RethinkDB going out of business does not become the justification to go closed source. At Neo4j we open source both the community and enterprise edition ( https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/tree/3.1/enterprise ) but we ask you to pay for the enterprise edition with a commercial license. Most of the non-employee contributions to Neo4j are not made directly to the product but using extensions, and plugins.
We find people who start with community edition will eventually move to enterprise once they establish the value it brings...and then eventually they will pay for the enterprise license. Yes, we have tons of people using the enterprise edition without paying... and that's ok. They'll come around too eventually once they see the value.
If we can build a business going full open source, you can too. Don't let the commercial failure of RethinkDB scare you otherwise.
Part of our team uses Neo4j. It's a giant pain in the ass. The amount of time we've spent on the phone with their support trying to unravel bugs that they caused is insane. We don't get that with a paid product like MSSQL. Hell, Postgres isn't that bad and it's FREE!
And they did the thing with the closing their source which nasty.
Then there's the separation of OnGDB which we looked at, but that didn't go well either. One day they deleted all of their packages. All gone. Thank God we had caches, but it took them a while to come back online. In hindsight because Neo4j had sued them. I understand that but that caused a LOT of headaches.
I feel that Graph databases are one of those things like Document databases. You probably don't need it...
The frustrating thing with Neo4j is that they have two modes - a fairly neutered open source version, and a ~$35k/node enterprise version, with absolutely nothing inbetween. They're apparently doing a cloudy hosted enterprise version somewhere inbetween but that's some time out and not a self-hostable option.
This is great! Thanks Apache! I'm interested how the mature product will stack up against Neo4j. Neo recently changed their licensing model. They used to be open source, then they switched to open core, which means you can use the feature light 'Community' version under an opensource license, but the 'Enterprise' fork is now closed source. Until recently the community version did not have the ability to kill a long running query without rebooting the entire database, this was thankfully fixed but the spirit of that long lived defect was clear. As soon as Apache AGE supports all of the Cypher syntax we use, I'll be switching over from the 3.x version of Neo4j Enterprise to AGE. Hopefully AGE works nicely with the available HA PostgreSQL features.
IANAL and this is just my reading, but it sounds like Neo4j the company gave their enterprise database product away on an open source licence that allows forking, stopped doing this, got forked, and are now trying to pull that ability to fork back using trademark law of the sort you'd more normally see when a supermarket makes its own brand products look suspiciously similar to the branded product they're trying to rip off.
The article mentions that they considered a graph database, but considered it too niche for production. Is that the general opinion on graph databases (like neo4j) at this point? Not production ready? This project seems like a perfect application for a graph database.
Not Neo4J, so much as a relational database with user-defined schema. They actually build the relational semantics on top of cassandra so that it scales like a beast. And they open sourced it - https://github.com/palantir/atlasdb
Now take that, add a few more database technologies to do remote indexing and on the fly imports on federated databases, and some geospatial hotness, give it a swanky UI (now web based, not java), and that’s pretty much the platform, or at least was as of 2014 when I left.
And the thing is, they’re remarkably open about all of that... it’s just that people like the boogeyman narrative more, so all the openness about their tech is completely overshadowed, but there’s a reason it and Pinterest were the two hottest internships for college CS students in 2012/2013.
According to [this page](https://neo4j.com/editions/) it's not. In fact, they are restricting important functionalities to their Enterprise Edition exclusively. Which means, the codebase is not the same.
At least it _sounds like_ they've been talking to other graph DB vendors about adopting (Open)Cypher. Who knows if it's really going to happen, but it makes me slightly more inclined to invest time in Neo4J's Cypher when I finally start playing with GraphDBs.
Don't see anything but my main problem is finding a good open source graph engine (NEO4J level maturity or close) that I can install locally and develop my application on and that allows me to spin up multiple graphs on the same machine easily.
I built an app with Neo4j once. It was a Rails app, built it from scratch in Neo4j.rb. I was hired by business where the owner hadn't coded any apps in 15 years and was obsessed with the theory of the graph database and how it was so much "easier" than using SQL.
Suddenly, every useful gem that allows you to throw together an app in 5 minutes had to be rewritten from the ground up. Things like authentication, pagination, etc. which could be done in 10 minutes in a standard Rails app took days.
The worst part is that I was not permitted to contribute these customs gems back to Open Source. He was a very selfish person who used almost exclusively proprietary software and thought that any of the long hours we spent to rebuild all of these basic puzzle pieces to work with Neo4J would give other people a leg up or advantage - as if competitors out there would decide to build a direct competitor with our identical tech stack and we wanted to slow them down as much as possible... sorry boss, but if they wanted to build a competitor prototype they would just build it with an SQL relational database and have the entire app done in 2 weeks.
About 3 months into the project I mentioned to someone at a technology meetup that I was building in app in Neo4j.rb and he laughed at me. I was drinking the graph koolaid still at the time and tried telling him about the advantages. He told me that as soon as the app was deployed I would see how much extra work I would have in-store for me. To be fair, he was right. Migrations just didn't work the same. Eventually I was discharged from the company because I did not agree with the management's unethical business practices and continue doing shady things and agree with their moral jusitifcations for crimes so the app never actually saw the light of day.
I am sure there are many production apps succeeding with Neo4j, but in the end I just saw a project whose scope was 10x what it should have been. If you have a "slow" app that launches 3 months earlier than your competitor, you still win.
> The Neo4j Community Edition is licensed under the free GNU General Public License (GPL) v3 while the Neo4j Enterprise Edition is dual licensed under Neo4j commercial license as well as under the free Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.
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