Neo4j property string limit

Question

I'm working on a KB type structure, and I'd like to store the free-form text / web content for each KB entry in a property. These can get pretty long - upwards of 60K or more text.

My question is:

• What is the limit for a string property?
• Can unstructured text like this be imported via CSV? By unstructured text I mean multiple lines, embedded quotes, HTTP tags, etc.

Answer 1

There is no size limit for a string. All long strings get externalized into a separate store file, see http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/property-compression.html for details.

This "strings store file" uses internally a block size. If your string is larger, multiple blocks will be allocated resulting in multiple seek and read operation on your disc. The block size can be configure only when creating a new data store using a unofficial config option string_block_size, see https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/blob/2.3/community/kernel/src/main/java/org/neo4j/graphdb/factory/GraphDatabaseSettings.java#L447.

Importing unstructured text from CSV should work if the strings in question are wrapped in double quotes (") and any double quotes inside the string get doubled, see http://neo4j.com/docs/stable/query-load-csv.html#load-csv-import-data-containing-escaped-characters. I don't remember completely but I think newlines are handled correctly if they are inside a double quoted string.