Combining Neo4J and MongoDB : Consistency

Question

I am experimenting a lot these days, and one of the things I wanted to do is combine two popular NoSQL databases, namely Neo4j and MongoDB. Simply because I feel they complement eachother perfectly. The first class citizens in Neo4j, the relations, are imo exactly what's missing in MongoDB, whereas MongoDb allows me to not put large amounts of data in my node properties.

So I am trying to combine the two in a Java application, using the Neo4j Java REST binding, and the MongoDB Java driver. All my domain entities have a unique identifier which I store in both databases. The other data is stored in MongoDB and the relations between entities are stored in Neo4J. For instance, both databases contain a userid, MongoDB contains the profile information, and Neo4J contains friendship relations. With the custom data access layer I have written, this works exactly like I want it to. And it's fast.

BUT... When I want to create a user, I need to create both a node in Neo4j and a document in MongoDB. Not necessarily a problem, except that Neo4j is transactional and MongoDB is not. If both were transactional, I would just roll back both transactions when one of them fails. But since MongoDB isn't transactional, I cannot do this.

How do I ensure that whenever I create a user, either both a Node and Document are created, or none of both. I don't want to end up with a bunch of documents that have no matching node.

On top of that, not only do I want my combined database interaction to be ACID compliant, I also want it to be threadsafe. Both the GraphDatabaseService and the MongoClient / DB are provided from singletons.

I found something about creating "Transaction Documents" in MongoDB, but I realy don't like that approach. I would like something nice and clean like the neo4j beginTx, tx.success, tx.failure, tx.finish setup. Ideally, something I can implement in the same try/catch/finally block.

Should I perhaps make a switch to CouchDB, which does appear to be transactional?

Edit : After some more research, sparked by a comment, I came to realize that CouchDB is also not suitable for my specific needs. To clarify, the Neo4j part is set in stone. The Document Store database is not as long as it has a Java Library.

Answer 1

Pieter-Jan,

if you are able to use Neo4j 2.0 you can implement a Schema-Index-Provider (which is really easy) that creates your documents transactionally in MongoDB.

As Neo4j makes its index providers transactional (since the beginning), we did that with Lucene and there is one for Redis too (needs to be updated). But it is much easier with Neo4j 2.0, if you want to you can check out my implementation for MapDB. (https://github.com/jexp/neo4j-mapdb-index)

Answer 2

Although I'm a huge fan of both technologies, I think a better option for you could be OrientDB. It's a graph (as Neo4) and document (as MongoDB) database in one and supports ACID transactions. Sounds like a perfect match for your needs.