About the future of this project

[tausifcreates]

Is it a long term thing? Previously we saw Ong DB (fork of Neo4j) die down. And what enterprise capabilities do you provide? Interested to know more.

[jmsuhy]

This is a long term project which has dedicated resources for the foreseeable future.

I helped the graph foundation get ONgDB off the ground as one of the first volunteer committers but I wanted to take a plugin approach that was GPL licensed, not AGPL licensed. I expect many of the plugin features will be rolled into ONgDB.

Let me know if you would like to talk further about the roadmap, which I am hoping the community will help define for version 2 and on.

[jmsuhy]

One of the reasons I chose the plugin approach, was so that end users could simply remove the plugin anytime they wished.

I had pushed this concept to the GraphFoundation, but they went down a different path of a full fork, which I respect.

[tausifcreates]

Hi, thanks a lot for your work and the reply. It's been amazing to see the effort going on.

I also love the plugin approach.

I cannot discuss the roadmap because I know little about this technology. But I am sure there are many knowledgeable people in the community who would be eager to do so.

I have a few questions -

1. Will this plugin support clustering and live backups? These things seem to be the main pain points. I also know it would take multiple man years to develop these features.

2. What is the state of Ong db? There seem to be no activities since the beginning of this year.

And the last I would say posting it on r/neo4j would help the community know about it.

[jmsuhy]

In my opinion, Neo4j EE clustering is really just a high availability mechanism. It is not a sharding type approach such as you see with elasticsearch or TigerGraph. They have tried to leverage some concepts using fabric / composite databases but they feel like after thoughts to me.

We actually tackle high availability several other ways depending on a project needs. For example open source and cloud based load balancers can handle HA to multiple instances.

You can use kafka to stream transactions to all instances to keep all instances consistent.

But if you have huge amounts of data streaming in all the time and want very fast consistency, then you may want to consider just using Neo4j EE’s HA approach for example.

Then again, at this point if you have the budget and you may start to experience Neo4j’s limitations because of its architecture and may want to consider something like TigerGraph or Amazon Neptune.

So I don’t think it is worth implementing clustering unless Neo4j does a major update to their infrastructure to allow for a sharding type clustering to be done.

I don’t believe we will implement live backups unless the community really pushes for it either.

For live backups, we usually just leverage the cloud provider snapshot features such as Amazon’s Snapshot functionality. I believe it is much faster than using the built in backup and restore mechanisms.

It is often overlooked that many cloud providers provide solutions for a lot of built in EE features such as live backups.

Here are a few items that I am proposing to the community for the roadmap and which we have already started prototyping internally.

• Composite Databases (successor of Fabric) are already planned as well.

• Enterprise Metrics and auditing

• New modular security framework that will leverage open policy agent, zero trust type functionality, and ABAC (superset of RBAC).

• Hardened Images and FIPs compliance.

[jmsuhy]

Also keep in mind that as soon as the graph query language standard is adopted, moving to other solutions will be quite easy. I believe it will be like switching from One RDBMS to ankther such as Oracle to Postgresql.

Especially since pretty much every Graph Database has to have graph algorithms implemented to stay relevant. For example: Neo4j has the GDS library, MemGraph has Memgraph Advanced Graph Extensions (MAGE), and so on..

We are keeping these upcoming changes in the graph world in mind so that the features we implement are the most useful to the community.

[tausifcreates]

@jmsuhy Sounds really good where you are heading! I would say some marketing would help to get the momentum going. Currently the star count isn't a lot. Which indicates many people in the community do not know about it.

I would also like to know what happened to Ong-db? It seems really quite there.

[jmsuhy]

I am not sure exactly as I am not part of the board, but I know they are still working on it and it is alive.

They were waiting on me for these big features, so I am guessing they may end up merging in the updates soon.

My personal focus will be to add the features to the DozerDB plugin then they can decide what they want to pull in based on their goals.

So things could pick up on the ONgDB 2.0 front as well with the release of this plugin.

[tausifcreates]

Thanks for your insightful feedback! Wish you the best.

[jmsuhy]

Thank you. This is for the community, so hopefully it is useful for them.