Hi Richard, Your assumption that it is not good data structure for SQL because it is a sparse matrix is flawed. It would all depend on how you stored your data. SQL usually ends up caching a lot of it's data in memory and there might be no reason why you ever need to do a join that would join every student to every exercise.
I'm not telling you not to use Neo4j, Neo4j is great but perhaps you are not getting what you want from SQL because of bad schema design. On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 9:14 PM, 'Michael Hunger' via Neo4j < neo4j@googlegroups.com> wrote: > Richard, > > I think you understood the graph data model well enough to get started, I > recommend to take the online intro course to get up to speed with the query > language. > > it should be easy to get your data imported into Neo4j with LOAD CSV + > MERGE > > for hosting there are cloud hosting offerings for neo4j, your database > could even fit on one of their free plans see: > http://neo4j.com/developer/guide-cloud-deployment > > Not sure how you would connect to the database from an application or if > you just want to use the plain database for your own or department/school > use? > > Michael > > > On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:04 AM, Richard Conrardy < > richardconra...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi, >> I am a mathematics teacher and I'd like to store my data in a more >> convenient way than Spreadsheets. >> I'm still not sure what database form to use, graph or relational. >> While I suppose that these forums are biased, I hope to get some good >> ideas. I don't have experience in databases or any query language, but I'm >> willing to invest. >> >> The Main part of the databse would be the marks per student per exercice. >> It would scale up to around 5000 students and 2000 exercices (not every >> student has done every exercice, thus a sparse matrix). >> While this seems to be excellent for spreadsheets, it seems subpar for >> SQL since crosstabs would produce 5000*2000 rows. In Neo4j I have two nodes >> and I link them by Grade with a numeric argument. >> >> The students themselves should contain information like email, but also >> be linked again to classes. >> The Exercices should be linked to class papers and maybe topics with >> propreties such as max marks. As far as I've read I shouldn't include >> binary files into my DB (a shame). >> >> I really like that Neo4j is easy to understand and intuitive. Both (Neo4j >> and SQL) seems easy to get information into and out of (via csv). >> >> I still have some worries about portability. I've got a hosting space >> with an SQL database (over phpmyAdmin) and Neo4j seems to made mainly for >> local use, it's not as easy to install as Joomla (a CMS) for example. >> >> So, what do you think about the situation? Is one sort of database >> clearly better than the other? Should I lean more towards SQL since it has >> more documentation (and is more "standard") or is Neo4j better suited for >> complete beginners? >> >> Thanks in advance >> Richard >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Neo4j" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to neo4j+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Neo4j" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to neo4j+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Neo4j" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neo4j+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
