Company
Date Published
Author
David Allen & Logan Smith
Word count
1597
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The Neo4j BI Connector is a solution designed to address the complexity of new data sources by providing a simple, programmatic, and supported way to interact with Neo4j and popular tooling. It allows users to retrieve read-only results from a Neo4j graph database for use in business intelligence (BI) applications, such as Tableau. The connector reduces dependencies on power users and custom ETL jobs, standardizes business intelligence workflows and architecture, provides access to real-time data, and increases collaboration by making it easier to share data with other groups within the enterprise. It works by exposing a virtual relational schema that is built by the driver, allowing users to issue SQL queries against Neo4j nodes and relationships. The connector translates SQL queries into Cypher queries, which are executed against the database via a standard Bolt connection, and returns the results back to the client. It supports various data types, including compound data types, and has an in-memory SQL Engine that can be used to satisfy any standard SQL query. The connector is designed to work with Neo4j 3.5 and 4.x series, requires APOC library installation on the server, and is compatible with popular BI tools like Tableau.