tailieunhanh - The Neo Database – A Technology Introduction (2006­11­23)

Scope of decision-making: Amajor factor is the scale at which query processing and viewmaterialization decisions are made. At one extreme, all queries in the entire system are optimized together, using complete knowledge of the available materialized views, resources, and network bandwidth constraints — this poses all of the challenges of multi-query optimization plus a number of additional difficulties. In particular, work must be distributed globally across many peers, and decisions must be made about when and where to materialize results for future use. At the other end of the spectrum, every decision is made on a single-node, single-query basis — this is the familiar problem of. | The Neo Database - A Technology Introduction 2006-11-23 The Neo Database This document is an introduction to the Neo database a next-generation database which we believe addresses some of the shortcomings of the data management systems on the market today. The target audience is a technologically inclined person with a background in software development. This document gives an overview of what Neo does and the benefits and drawbacks of using Neo in your application development. It will also try to give a glimpse of how Neo works and how developing with Neo is different from developing with a relational database. In a nut-shell Neo is a robust scalable high-performance and embedded persistence engine for efficient management of semi-structured and network-oriented data. That s a lot of buzzwords Let s have a closer look Neo is a database designed for network-oriented data. This is data that is ordered in complex networks or deep trees. Where the relational model is based on tables columns and rows Neo s primitives are nodes relationships and properties. Together these form a large network of information that we call a node space. Additionally Neo shines at handling semi-structured data. Semi-structured data is a research term that is quickly gaining ground outside of academia. Simply put semi-structured data typically has few mandatory but many optional attributes. As a consequence it usually has a very dynamic structure sometimes to the point where it varies even between every single element. Data with that degree of variance is difficult to fit in a relational database schema but can be easily represented in the Neo model. Neo is an embedded persistence engine which means that it s a small lightweight and non-intrusive Java library that s easy to include in your development environment. Because it s embedded there s no overhead from serializing persistence requests to declarative queries. Neo has been written from scratch with performance and scalability in mind.