Neo4j, the open source Java graph database, and Windows Azure by Josh Sandhu.
From the post:
Recently I was travelling in Europe. I alwasy find it a pleasure to see a mixture of varied things nicely co-mingling together. Old and new, design and technology, function and form all blend so well together and there is no better place to see this than in Malmö Sweden at the offices of Diversify Inc., situated in a building built in the 1500’s with a new savvy workstyle. This also echoed at the office of Neo Technology in a slick and fancy incubator, Minc, situated next to the famous Turning Torso building and Malmö University in the new modern development of the city.
My new good friends, Diversify’s Magnus Mårtensson, Micael Carlstedt, Björn Ekengren, Martin Stenlund and Neo Technology’s Peter Neubauer hosted my colleague Anders Wendt from Microsoft Sweden, and me. The topic of this meeting was about Neo Technology’s Neo4j, open source graph database, and Windows Azure. Neo4j is written in Java, but also has a RESTful API and supports multiple languages. The database works as an object-oriented, flexible network structure rather than as strict and static tables. Neo4j is also based on graph theory and it has the ability to digest and work with lots of data and scale is well suited to the cloud. Diversify has been doing some great work getting Java to work with Windows Azure and has given us on the Interoperability team a lot of great feedback on the tools Microsoft is building for Java. They have also been working with some live customers and have released a new case study published in Swedish and an English version made available by Diversify on their blog.
The most interesting part of the interviews was the statement that getting a Java application to run in Azure wasn’t hard. Getting a Java application to run well in Azure was another matter.
That was the disappointing aspect of this post as well. So other steps are required to get Neo4j to run well on Azure. How about something more than the general statement? Something that developers could use to judge the difficulty in considering a move to Azure?
Supplemental materials on getting Neo4j to run well on Azure would take this from a “we are all excited” piece, despite there being some disclosed set of issues, to being a substantive contribution towards overcoming interoperability issues to everyone’s benefit.