Hello everyone, I am going to write my master thesis about the suitability of graph databases in GIS applications (at least I hope so^^). The database has to provide topological queries, network analysis and the ability to store large amount of mapdata for viewing - all based on OSM-data of Germany (< 100M nodes). Most likely I will compare Neo4j to PostGIS. As a starting point I want to know why you would recommend Neo4j to do the job? What are the main advantages of a graph database compared to a (object-)relational database in the GIS environment? The main focus and the goal of this work should be to show a performance improvement over relational databases. In a student project (OSM navigation system) we worked with relational (SQLite) and object-oriented (Perst) databases on netbook hardware and embedded systems. The relational database approach showed us two problems: If you transfer the OSM model directly into tables then you have a lot of joins which slows everything down (and lots of redundancy when using different tables for each zoom level). The other way is to store as much as possible in one big (sparse) table. But this would also have some performance issues I guess and from a design perspective it is not a nice solution. The object-oriented database also suffered from many random reads when loading a bounding box. In addition we could not say how data was stored in detail. The performance indeed increased after caching occured or by the use of SSD hardware. You can also store everything in RAM (money does the job), but for now you have to assume that all of the data has to be read from a slow disk the first time. Can Neo4j be configured to read for example a bounding box of OSM data from disk in an efficient way (data locality)? Maybe you also have some suggestions where I should have a look at in this work and what can be improved in Neo4j to get better results. I also would appreciate related papers.
kindly regards, Daniel -- View this message in context: http://neo4j-community-discussions.438527.n3.nabble.com/Neo4j-in-GIS-Applications-tp3393925p3393925.html Sent from the Neo4j Community Discussions mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list User@lists.neo4j.org https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
