What Is Amazon Neptune?
Amazon Neptune is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets. The core of Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine. This engine is optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds latency. Neptune supports the popular property-graph query languages Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and Neo4j's openCypher, and the W3C's RDF query language, SPARQL. This enables you to build queries that efficiently navigate highly connected datasets. Neptune powers graph use cases such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug discovery, and network security.
The Neptune database is highly available, with read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across Availability Zones. Neptune provides data security features, with support for encryption at rest and in transit. Neptune is fully managed, so you no longer need to worry about database management tasks like hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups.
Neptune Analytics; is an analytics database engine that complements Neptune database and that can quickly analyze large amounts of graph data in memory to get insights and find trends. Neptune Analytics is a solution for quickly analyzing existing graph databases or graph datasets stored in a data lake. It uses popular graph analytic algorithms and low-latency analytic queries.
To learn more about using Amazon Neptune, we recommend that you start with the following sections:
If you're new to graphs, or are not yet ready to invest in a full Neptune production environment, visit our Getting started with Neptune topic to find out how to use Neptune Jupyter notebooks for learning and developing without incurring costs.
Also, before you begin designing a database, we recommend that you consult the
GitHub repository AWS
Reference Architectures for Using Graph Databases
Key Service Components
Primary DB instance – Supports read and write operations, and performs all of the data modifications to the cluster volume. Each Neptune DB cluster has one primary DB instance that is responsible for writing (that is, loading or modifying) graph database contents.
Neptune replica – Connects to the same storage volume as the primary DB instance and supports only read operations. Each Neptune DB cluster can have up to 15 Neptune Replicas in addition to the primary DB instance. This provides high availability by locating Neptune Replicas in separate Availability Zones and distribution load from reading clients.
Cluster volume – Neptune data is stored in the cluster volume, which is designed for reliability and high availability. A cluster volume consists of copies of the data across multiple Availability Zones in a single AWS Region. Because your data is automatically replicated across Availability Zones, it is highly durable, and there is little possibility of data loss.
Supports Open Graph APIs
Amazon Neptune supports open graph APIs for both property graphs (Gremlin and openCypher) and RDF graphs (SPARQL). It provides high performance for both of these graph models and their query languages. You can choose the Property Graph (PG) model and access the same graph with both the openCypher query language and/or the Gremlin query language. If you use the W3C standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) model, you can access your graph using the standard SPARQL query language.
Highly Secure
Neptune provides multiple levels of security for your database. Security features
include network isolation using Amazon VPC
Fully Managed
With Amazon Neptune, you don’t have to worry about database management tasks like hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups.
You can use Neptune to create sophisticated, interactive graph applications that can query billions of relationships in milliseconds. SQL queries for highly connected data are complex and hard to tune for performance. With Neptune, you can use the popular graph query languages Gremlin, openCypher, and SPARQL to execute powerful queries that are easy to write and perform well on connected data. This capability significantly reduces code complexity so that you can quickly create applications that process relationships.
Neptune is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability. It increases database performance and availability by tightly integrating the database engine with an SSD-backed virtualized storage layer that is built for database workloads. Neptune storage is fault-tolerant and self-healing. Disk failures are repaired in the background without loss of database availability. Neptune automatically detects database crashes and restarts without the need for crash recovery or rebuilding the database cache. If the entire instance fails, Neptune automatically fails over to one of up to 15 read replicas.
