Like any other tool, Neo4j is very good in some situations, but not well suited to others. The basic principle is that Neo4j provides amazing performance for graph traversal. Everything requiring jumping from one node to another is incredibly fast.
On the other hand, Neo4j is probably not the best tool if you want to do the following:
- Perform full DB scans, for instance, answering the question "What is?"
- Do full table aggregates
- Store large documents: the key-values properties list needs to be kept small (let's say no more than around 10 properties)
Some of those pain points can be addressed with a proper graph model. For instance, instead of saving all information as node properties, can we consider moving some of them to another node with a relationship between them? Depending on the kind of requests you are interested in, the graph schema most suited to your application may differ. Before going into the details of graph modeling, we need to stop briefly and and talk about the different kinds of graph properties which will also influence our choice.
