Amazon Neptune Reviews

What is our primary use case?

The Amazon Neptune is a graph database. In the graph database, instead of relational tables, you have nodes and edges. For example, in a conversation between two people, the two people would be a node, and they are connecting because they are talking and that would be an edge. If you can imagine the model spreading out, this person knows this person, this person works with this person. It's more of a LinkedIn or Facebook-type relationship, which has its benefits.

What is most valuable?

Relational databases are never good at identifying patterns in graphs or other similar relationships, whereas Amazon Neptune is.  Amazon Neptune is good for identifying fraud and many banks are using it. For example, know that I go to certain places all the time that are connected with nodes and edges, such as gas stations, shops, and Amazon. Since people are creatures of habit, the banks can use those nodes and edges to make a model of where I like to shop and spend money. If they see something pop up that's out of character for me, then they know immediately that it is possible fraud. They can determine this because a purchase I made was somewhere I never go or because of geography.

What needs improvement?

Amazon Neptune could improve by spreading more awareness for others to have an understanding of the solution because the technology is fairly new. The developer community and larger community do not understand it yet.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Amazon Neptune within the last 12 months. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of Amazon Neptune is very good. Many companies, such as Amazon and Facebook, couldn't make things work with a relational database. Relational databases are too restrictive to do the things they wanted to. This is how these new types of databases came to be, they needed a better solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Amazon Neptune was built to be a scalable solution.

How was the initial setup?

The implementation of Amazon Neptune is straightforward. With my Amazon AWS account and VPC, I can create a Neptune database. You then can start entering data.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are on par for pricing and Google has been raising its prices.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have evaluated Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

What other advice do I have?

My advice to others wanting to start using Amazon Neptune would be to start small and it is more geared toward the developer that's creating the website. For example, if they were creating a LinkedIn website, they are going to use that type of database, there's is not much more to do. These databases are geared more towards developers where DBAs don't have much to do with the Neptune type database. I rate Amazon Neptune a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)