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Seven Ways to Make Big Data an Actionable Opportunity

In terms of actual adoption, the fastest growing segment of the database market actually belongs to graph databases that are increasingly being used to drive new classes of applications that require mapping functionality.

Looking to extend the popularity of those databases, Neo Technology this week announced the general availability of Neo4j 2.0, which includes enhancements to the Cypher query language that Neo Technology provides for building applications.

Neo Technology CEO Emil Eifrem says the enhancements to Cypher include an interactive query capability that makes it a lot easier to visually prototype applications and additional schema constructs that extend the data modeling capabilities of Neo4j.

Eifrem says that graph databases have emerged as a complement to traditional SQL databases that are optimized for a specific class of applications, largely because a graph database can handle those applications using only about one-tenth the amount of code it would require to build something equivalent using SQL.

The end goal, says Eifrem, is to make graph database technology more accessible to a broader range of developers by making it easier to build applications using a graph database. For that reason, Neo Technology is now also providing free interactive training online.

Of course, that does present database administrators with the challenge of having to manage yet another database architecture. But in a Big Data world where the number of database architectures is already rapidly increasing, what’s one more?