Tag Archives: software

Scaling Writes

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Most of the applications using Neo4j are read heavy and scale by getting more powerful servers or adding additional instances to the HA cluster. Writes however can be a little bit tricker. Before embarking on any of the following strategies it is best that the server is tuned. See the Linux Performance Guide for details. One strategy we’ve seen already is splitting the reads and writes to the cluster, so the writes only go to the Master. The brave can even change the push factor to zero and set a pull interval only in neo4j/conf/neo4j.properties:
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Knowledge Bases in Neo4j

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From the second we are born we are collecting a wealth of knowledge about the world. This knowledge is accumulated and interrelated inside our brains and it represents what we know. If we could export this knowledge and give it to a computer, it would look like ConceptNet. ConceptNet is a semantic network that…

…is built from nodes representing concepts, in the form of words or short phrases of natural language, and labeled relationships between them. These are the kinds of things computers need to know to search for information better, answer questions, and understand people’s goals.

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Extending Neo4j

One of the great things about Neo4j is how easy it is to extend it. You can extend Neo4j with Plugins and Unmanaged Extensions. Two great examples of plugins are the Gremlin Plugin (which lets you use the Gremlin library with Neo4j) and the Spatial Plugin (which lets you perform spatial operations like searching for data within specified regions or within a specified distance of a point of interest).

Plugins are meant to extend the capabilities of the database, nodes, or relationships. Unmanaged extensions are meant to let you do anything you want. This great power comes with great responsibility, so be careful what you do here. David Montag cooked up an unmanaged extension template for us to use on github so lets give it a whirl. We are going to clone the project, compile it, download Neo4j, configure Neo4j to use the extension, test the extension and tweak it a bit.
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