Facebook’s database of people and Google’s database of information have one crucial thing in common: they were both built using graph technology. Their use of graphs is a powerful representation of how the technology handles huge volumes of content and makes data available to users in real time. Businesses of all shapes and sizes are taking a nod from these industry giants and harnessing the graph with the help of Neo4j, a leading graph database.
A pioneer of graph technology with brand-name customers such as Walmart, eBay, HP and Cisco, Neo4j has been enabling graph-based search for organizations all over the world for over a decade.
It’s impossible for traditional relational databases and keyword-based searches to keep up with the crush of big data. That is why companies have turned to graphs,” said Emil Eifrem, founder and CEO of Neo Technology, the makers of Neo4j. “For businesses that have huge volumes of content, graph-based search provides the best possible way to make this data available to users, as Google and Facebook have both demonstrated.”
Neo4j 1,000 Times Faster Than Relational Databases
Companies have adopted Neo4j because it is 1,000 times faster than relational databases for working with connected data. And its graph-based search features have helped firms tap into key business insights for competitive advantage.
Examples include CrunchBase, which profiles more than 650,000 high-tech companies, executives and investors and all the activities connecting them, and Decibel, a company that offers detailed data on over one million albums of every type of music, including the composers, musicians and everything they’ve recorded.
In addition to speed, Neo4j offers numerous competitive advantages, such as better customer experience, more targeted content and increased revenue opportunities. There are many other areas where the technology is valuable, including customer support portals, content portals, product catalogs and social networks.
Businesses get these graph-based search capabilities right off the shelf with Neo4j. Neo4j makes possible advanced search-and-discovery because:
- Companies can structure their data exactly as it occurs and carry out searches based on this structure. Neo4j provides a database model and language that supports this.
- Users get fast, accurate search results in real time. Neo4j assigns a variety of rich metadata to content for rapid search and retrieval.
- Companies can easily change their data and its structure and add a wide variety of new data. The built-in flexibility of Neo4j’s data model allows this.
The real difference compared to a relational database is that we can give people an answer within their lifetime – because sometimes you’d have to wait a full minute or two minutes, and two minutes in the world of computers is an eternity, so that’s just as bad as not answering them,” said Evan Stein, Founder of Decibel. “Graph-based search makes things possible that we only dreamed of before.”
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