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Hundreds of customers use Neo to store their business data and to power their mission-critical systems. At the Swedish Allicance for Middleware Infrastructure (SWAMI), a flexible database was needed for an integration platform for Sweden's higher education sites. Chief architects surveyed the market for open source and commercial alternatives, and in competition with RDF stores and relational databases, selected Neo as the underlying technology of the platform repository component.
Open Metadir
The OpenMetadir2 (OM2) event-based integration platform will route messages containing data about employees, students, grades, classes and much more. This information represents mission-critical data for any higher education institution. The OM2 project managers realized that if all this critical data will flow through the OM2 platform, it would be beneficial to have a repository component that stores the information in one secure place. This repository will then be the de facto referent for all this critical information.
The repository technology must be extremely robust and fault tolerant, yet give rapid response to complex queries. In addition, it must have a flexible data model that can capture any data that flows through the platform, even by systems that were added long after the repository was developed. After surveying many persistence technologies, the OM2 chief architects selected the Neo graph database as the technology for the OM2 repository.
SWAMI
SWAMI, Swedish Alliance for Middleware Infrastructure, is a collaboration between four Swedish universities in Stockholm, Linköping, Umeå and Gothenburg.
Joakim Nejdeby is the CIO at Linköping University.
Why do you need the OM2 platform at Linköping University?
- At all universities, you need a directory of concepts like resources, computers and students. Moreover, you typically need to dynamically add new concepts and change the relationships between them. Changes occur all the time, like changes in schedules and students’ accounts and that also means changes in the infrastructure. What we needed was a platform with a flexible model that could easily capture these changing requirements. It’s all about giving the right student the right info at the right moment.
What makes the Neo graph database special?
- Neo’s database model solves problems other models wouldn’t be able to solve. It can capture the dynamic requirements of a complex integration scenario. I also like the combination of Open Source development and a strong company behind. Universities often support Open Source entrepreneurs because we believe in the freedom and the will to development it inspires. Neo Technology is also a company, and therefore as the CIO I can trust them as a secure supplier.
Why not use a traditional relational database like MySQL or Oracle?
Nejdeby says that most of today's information does not readily fit in a relational database. When they looked at the information, it was more networks (graphs) than tables. When they surveyed persistence technology, it was time to let the actual structure of the information itself point out the direction:
- We chose database technology based on the nature of our information. To do it the other way around, to try to adapt the information just so it will fit the database really is a bad idea.