AWS

Amazon Announces Fully Managed Graph Database Service – Neptune

What is Amazon Neptune?

Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud. Amazon’s Neptune can build and run applications that operate on highly connected, context-dependent relationship driven data sets. It also supports replication across reading replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and Availability Zones (AZ). Since it is fully managed, automatic minor version upgrade, backup, encryption, failover are fully managed.

The graph database makes it possible to query the data using a graph structure. Represent and store data based on the concept of node, edge, property. An important concept here is that graphs directly record relationships between different data items in the database. Because graphs directly link related objects, objects that are related to each other can be obtained collectively by a single operation.

Amazon Neptune’s core is a dedicated graph database engine optimized to store large relational data sets and query graphs with minimal latency. It is optimized for graph queries and supports up to 15 minimum latencies spanning three availability zones and can perform read capacity scaling and multiple graph queries per second.

This database provides fault tolerance and self-healing storage, and six data copies are replicated across the three availability zones on the cloud. The feature of the graph database is that it allows you to easily and quickly acquire complex hierarchical structures. Such a structure is difficult to model in a relational database or it is very time-consuming.

How It Works

Load Property Graph & RDF Data – You can import from S3. For the Resource Description Framework (RDF) graph model. Neptune supports Turtle, N-Triples, N-Quads and RDF/XML serializations. For the Property Graph model, Neptune supports a CSV format. RDF expresses all edges of the graph with three combinations (subject, predicate, object). Using URI makes it easy to express linked data.

Store Billions of Relationships – Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable and fully managed graph database service that efficiently stores and navigates highly connected data. Its query engine is optimized for leading graph query languages, Apache TinkerPoP Gremlin, and the W3C’s RDF SPARQL.

Fast Graph Queries – You can easily build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets using SPARQL endpoint for RDF or a Gremlin WebSocket Server for Property Graphs.

Use Cases

Neptune’s use cases include social networking applications, recommendation engines, fraud detection tools, and network applications that need to map the complex topology of the organization’s infrastructure.

Features of Amazon Neptune

Open – Supports Apache TinkerPop and a graph model conforming to Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Fast and Scalable – For billions of data relations, a millisecond query.

Reliable – Six replications can be created across three availability zones, full backup / full restore is possible.

Easy – Gremlin and SPARQL make it easy to construct powerful queries.

Benefits of Amazon Neptune

High Availability and Durability – Amazon Neptune is highly atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability compliant. Neptune features fault-tolerant and self-healing storage built for the cloud that replicates six copies of your data across three AZs.

High Scalability & Performance – Fifteen low latency are supported by Amazon Neptune across three AZs to scale read capacity and execute <1 Lakh graph queries per second.

Highly Secure – Multiple levels of security for the database is provided by Neptune. Data underlying is encrypted

Fully Managed – Amazon Neptune takes care of database management tasks such as backups, software patching, hardware provisioning, configuration, setup etc. The database is continuously monitored and backs up to Amazon S3.

Supports Open Graph APIs – Neptune supports the Graph API in various applications for both TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL. AWS announced that it has created an error recovery service within 30 seconds. The availability is 99.99%.