Scaling the import

Many users of Neo4j need to import larger datasets into Neo4j, at least for their initial startup use cases. Doing so can be difficult using any of the previous techniques and takes a long time. Although there are a number of things that you can tweak (for example, the batch sizes in Neo4j-shell-tools), there is a limit to the transactional write performance that you will get from running the Neo4j server. This limit is mostly I/O driven because of the transactional qualities of the Neo4j database management system; it basically needs to go down to disk at every commit and can take some time.

This is why Neo Technology and its community have developed an alternative way of creating Neo4j data stores without having the Neo4j server running. This allows the import process to be executed in an all or nothing fashion, without doing intermediate commits on the underlying component transactions. The import will either succeed or fail in its entirety. This nontransactional approach...