how much data can i store per node in Neo4j

Question

I need to save big chunks of Unicode text strings in Neo4j nodes. The documentation does not mention anything about the size of data one can store per node.

Does anyone know that?

Answer 1

I just tried the following with the neo4j web interface :

I wrote a line of 26 characters and duplicated it through 32000 lines, which makes a total of 832000 characters.

I created a node with a property "text" and copied my text in it, and it worked perfectly.

I tried again with 64000 lines with white spaces at the end of lines, with a total of 1728000 characters. Created a new node, then queried the node and copied the result back in a file to check the size (you never know), and wc gave me 1728001 (the one must be an error in the copy/paste process I suppose).

It didn't seem to complain.

FYI this is equivalent to a text with 345600 words of an average size of 4 and a space (5 characters), and a book of 1000 pages with 300 words per page.

I don't know however how this could impact performances if there are too many nodes. If it doesn't work well because of this, you could always consider having neo4j for storing informations about relationships, with a property ID as an id for another document oriented database to retrieve the text (or simply the path of a file as a path property).

Answer 2

Neo4j is by default indexed using Lucene. Lucene was built as a full text search toolbox (with Solr being the de facto search engine implementation). Since Lucene was intended to search over large amounts of text, my suspicion is that you can put as much text into a node as you want and it will work just fine.