Blog > Amazon Neptune-Graph Database Vs. Neo4j
Amazon Neptune- Fully Managed Graph Database
Amazon Neptune is a fully-managed graph database service. It’s a fast service, and its design is specifically for graph applications that need to have high throughput query answering with low latency. So the Neptune users can query billions of relationships with millisecond latency.
It is designed to be reliable. Amazon Neptune also offers multi-az, high availability supports further horizontal scaling through reading replication, and also supports full encryption at rest.
It has the enterprise features that customers typically need to put a graph database into production, and it’s easy to use by supporting the most commonly used graph models, the property graphs, and the RDF models and providing support for gremlin and sparkle.
Billions of Relationships: It is optimized to store billions of relationships and query the graph with million-second latency.
W3C RDF: It supports famous graph models, property graphs, W3C, RDF, their respective query languages, apache tinker pop gremlin, and sparkle so, it’s easy to build queries that efficiently navigate highly connected data sets.
- Neptune is Open: It supports Apache TinkerPop, W3C, and RDF models.
- Fast: It allows queries on billions of relationships with millisecond latency.
- Reliable: Six replicas of users’ data across 3 AZs with full backup and restore.
- Easy: Build powerful queries easily with Gremlin and SPAROL.
Fully Managed Services of Neptune
- Easily configurable via the console.
- Multi-AZ, high availability, ACID
- Support for up to 15 read replicas
- Supports for encryption at rest
- Supports encryption in transit (TLS)
- Backup and restore, point-in-time recovery
Advantages of Neptune
- Neptune uses the Amazon Neptune ML capability to utilize graph neural networks.
- A machine learning technique purpose-built to make easy and fast predictions using graph data.
- Neptune ML impresses the accuracy of most predictions by over 50 percent when compared to the non-graph method.
- Amazon Neptune supports low latency.
Advantages of Neo4j
- Neo4j is an easy to query language called CQL or cypher, like SQL.
- It follows the property graph data model.
- It supports unique constraints.
- Neo4j also supports full acid (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability).
- Allows exporting data to JSON and XLS format.
- It supports two Java APIs: Cypher API and Native Java API.
- It provides javascript for UI frameworks like node.js.
- Rest API is accessible by any programming language like Javascript, PHP, Java, Spring, Scala, etc.
Amazon Neptune Vs. Neo4j
Core Features | Amazon Neptune | Neo4j |
| Description | AWS Neptune is a fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud. | Scalable, ACID-compliant graph database designed with a high-performance distributed cluster architecture, available in self-hosted and cloud offerings |
| Primary database model | Graph DBMS, RDF store | Graph DBMS |
| Developer | Amazon | Neo4j, Inc |
| Server Operating System | Hosted | Linux OS, X Solaris Windows |
| Secondary Indexes | No | Yes |
| SQL | NO | NO |
Why need a Graph Database?
- Declarative, readable, expressive.
- Made for CRUD on Graphs.
- Based on patterns.
- Powerful to convert from imperative languages.
- Able to be opened up and adopted by another Graph tech.
AWS Neptune Vs. Neo4j – High Availability and Replication
AWS Neptune | Neo4j |
| Amazon Neptune divides data into 10GB “chunks” spread across many disks. Each chunk is replicated six ways across three availability zones. Loss of up to two copies does not affect writes, while the loss of up to three copies does affect reads. | Neo4j instances have master-slave cluster replication in high availability (HA) mode. A Master maintains a master copy of each data object and replicates this to each Slave (the full dataset is replicated across the entire cluster). |
| Neptune supports up to 15 read replicas at a time to replicate asynchronously with automated failovers (replica instances share similar underlying storage as the primary instance). | Updates are typically made from the master, which has no regard for the number of instances that fail as long as it remains available. |
| AWS Neptune is not supporting cross-region replicas; it allows for prioritizing and modifying as failover targets by assigning a promotion priority. | Neo4j doesn’t have a master- replication, and there is no way to set master priority for instances. |
| Amazon Neptune provides high availability boils down to the number of replicas and their priority tiers. | Although writes are synced with the elected master, reads can be done locally on each child, which means read capacity increases linearly with instances. |
Author: SVCIT Editorial
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