Neo4j cozies up to Microsoft as 'property sharding' promises to overcome scalability struggle

Neo4j has introduced "property sharding" which, according to one analyst, will help overcome its earlier struggles with scalability, while also allowing transactional workloads on the same system.

The graph database stalwart — used by customers including BT Group, risk insight company Dun & Bradstreet, and chemicals giant BASF — launched Infinigraph earlier this month promising a new distributed graph architecture in its self-managed offering. The system will also soon be available in Microsoft's AuraDB DBaaS and as part of Fabrics, the Redmond software company's data lake and analytics platform.

Graph databases group data according to nodes and edges as opposed to the columns and rows of relational databases, in the hope that the structure is more apt for the analysis of networks of relationships, for example, between groups of companies or individuals using social media.

As well as newfound scalability, Infinigraph would allow the system to accommodate transactional workloads as ...