The difference between a graphical database: Neo4j & AllegroGraph

Question

What is the difference between these two databases: Neo4j and AllegroGraph? What is better for Java web programming?

Answer 1

If you have no reason to choose RDF + SPARQL (support for both products), Neo4j provides a pure Java API for managing the property graph (nodes + relationships + properties for both). For web applications, I wrote an example using the Spring Framework, which also exists in a simplified version as a workshop .

Disclaimer: Obviously, I am on the Neo4j team and I do not have any in-depth knowledge of AllegroGraph.

Answer 2

I chose AllegroGraph over Neo4j due to support for SPARQL queries. It seemed to me that the Neo4j approach to bypassing the graph is less accurate, especially for more complex search operations.

... and no, I have no connection with any organization.

Answer 3

AllegroGraph has a java client library that supports 2 standard Java semantic APIs: Jena and Sesame. The client source is the EPL on github. AG supports sparql, transactions, reasoning, geospatial, temporal and graphical analysis. There are no additional features specifically for web applications, but they will fit into any infrastructure as a library.

(I work for Franz.)

Answer 4

Another consideration is licenses. The free version of AllegroGraph can be used as long as you have less than 50 million triples. See http://www.franz.com/agraph/allegrograph/ag_commercial_edition.lhtml

Neo4j is free if your project uses a community version; only if you change the source of Neo4j, you must make the changes open source. The main conditions of the license can be found on their home page: http://neo4j.org/

Answer 5

In addition to SPARQL, AllegoGraph allows you to write rules and Prolog queries. For complex query logic, it is much more expressive than SPARQL.

There are several examples in the Java tutorial: http://www.franz.com/agraph/support/documentation/v4/java-tutorial/java-tutorial-40.html