Amazon Neptune is a fully managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets.

How It Works

Neptune supports popular graph models Property Graph and W3C’s RDF, and their respective query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and SPARQL. It allows you to store billions of relationships and query the graph with milliseconds latency.

Benefits

• Fully Managed: Neptune is fully managed, which means AWS handles the work of managing the database.
• Highly Available: Neptune is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability.
• Secure: Neptune includes multiple levels of security for your database, including network isolation using Amazon VPC, encryption at rest using keys you create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

Limitations

• Limited Scaling: Neptune can scale up but not out, which might be a limitation for some use cases.
• No Full Text Search: Neptune does not natively support full-text search.
• Learning Curve: There is a learning curve associated with graph databases and their query languages.

Features

• Fast and Scalable: Neptune is designed to offer fast, reliable graph database performance.
• Support for Graph APIs: Neptune supports TinkerPop and SPARQL, allowing you to build queries that efficiently navigate highly connected datasets.
• Event-driven Programming: Neptune can be integrated with AWS Lambda for event-driven programming.

Use Cases

• Social Networking: Neptune powers graph use cases such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug discovery, and network security.
• Knowledge Graphs: Neptune can be used to build knowledge graphs for storing information and metadata.
• Life Sciences: Neptune is used in life sciences for drug discovery by mapping biological datasets.
• Identity Graphs: Neptune can be used to build identity graphs to understand customer behavior.