Server side auto sharding support in Neo4j

[dhsieh]

Jan this year, I was reading release notes in
http://blog.neo4j.org/2012/01/released-neo4j-16-ga-jorn-kniv.html.
There was a "Looking Forward" section listing feature requests where
"Sharding and horizontal scalability" was ranked as most desirable
feature among others. And now when I look at the latest release notes
in http://blog.neo4j.org/2012/04/neo4j-17-ga-bastutrask-bank-released.html.
It said nothing about this feature.

In the past, Neo4j alwasy uses abmbigious terms like "domain-level",
"cache" or "user assisted" sharding which really means that there is
no server-side sharding as would in other NoSQL products like,
MongoDB, Cassandra or Hbase. I recognize that sharding graph is a
tougher challenge than other NoSQL with its rich model semantic.
Nonetheless, it would be great if Neo4j can offer some support even
with a baby step if you will.

[Jim Webber]

Hello,

There is a project underway at Neo Tech for horizontal read/write scale of neo4j - that's why it's disappeared from the "regular" neo4j roadmap.

Now, sharding of course isn't the only way of reaching large scale. For example fewer writes tend to be needed to achieve the same effect in Neo as in Cassandra (a function of the data model).

Sharding in Mongo I believe is often used to avoid the penalties associated with the locking semantics of that store more than to provide PB scale.

In the software we'll build, we will retain transactional guarantees as you expect from the existing software and we intend to make any "shards" an implementation detail since what you really want is scale-out, not shards per se.

Rest assured that when the software is in a state that we feel is fit for purpose then this list gets to know about it first.

Jim