Hi Roman, Node IDs will not go away in the foreseeable future, but will continue to diminish in importance. For example, the 2.0 release diminished the need to use node IDs by introducing labels & unique indexes as an easy way to find individual nodes. Because node IDs are internal IDs representing physical storage offsets, they should not be considered stable over extended periods (and sometimes even short periods) of time. One thing that can happen, for example, is that a node being inserted can end up filling the space vacated by a deleted node, thereby assuming the same ID as the first (deleted) piece of data.
Node IDs are safe to use inside of a transaction, and they can be useful as a handle while doing visualization. They are also the fastest way to get at any piece bit of data, as node ID lookups go straight to the physical location (on memory or disk) without incurring an index lookup. A good rule of thumb for your application is to use node IDs in a similar way as you would a ROWID in a relational database. Philip On Jan 16, 2014, at 5:58 PM, Roman Tkalenko <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > I've recently have encountered some posts on SO and here, in which members of > neo4j team share their thoughts concerning discontinuation of nodes' ids > usage as a part of public API. I'd like to know if it's true and if yes, how > soon can that happen? > The thing is, I've also read that ID's are just offsets into the storage > files, so the access by the means of them is probably the fastest. Is that > true as well? How much performance does user loose compared to traditional > user-supplied IDs? > Regards, > Roman. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Neo4j" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Neo4j" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
