I know this has come up a couple of times and that transactions are being worked on it Traversers, but I just can't get my head around how people use neo4j transactions in general. When I started writing neo4j code a couple days ago, I was amazed at two things: 1) how efficient and fast it was and 2) how easy it was to write. It remained that way until I started writing more interesting, deep, and large models.
Now, after several days of working with it, I am fed up with transaction management in Neo. I feel that the implementation and strict reliance on transactions ruins those two things that I loved about it. I understand transaction management in general and have implemented several systems that relied on SQL transaction management, but when the simplest read requires a transaction, it makes the code very cumbersome. In addition, my profiling shows that a lot of program time is being spent on transaction management in very simple reading code. I'm hoping that the reason is that I just haven't figured out the correct usage pattern for working on nodes and, very importantly, encapsulating the transaction management in my model. I'm really looking for a solution here, not just criticizing neo4j. Let's say I have a User object, for purposes of example. Here are two basic things I want to do: 1. User.getName() I want a property off the node. I assume I encapsulate the single internal getProperty call in a transaction? My accessor code has just quadrupled in size, even if I am ok with this silly, time-consuming transaction. Leaving it out means every piece of code in my system has to understand to start a neo4j transaction just to get the user's name. 2: for (User user : getUsers()) I want to do something to all the users in the system. There are A LOT of them and they are all linked to a UserFactory or whatever. I can't create an internal list, because they won't all fit in memory. So I wrap the Iterable<Relationship/Node> in an Iterable that wraps the nodes in POJOs. Only there is no way to do this without enclosing that loop in a transaction. Do people just create giant transactions that wrap their entire programs since they don't work with large graphs/models? Or is your code entirely littered with transaction = service.beginTx(); transaction.success(); transaction.finish()? I've looked around on the wiki and site and I can't find good answers to these questions. The IMDB example transactionalizes things at a very high level. In a sense, wrapping the entire program (web request) in a single transaction. I guess that's fine if you have small operations and use Spring injection, but what if you don't? _______________________________________________ Neo mailing list [email protected] https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
