Amazon Neptune
- What it is
- Fully managed graph database. Stores relationships as first-class data.
- Supports the property graph model (Gremlin, openCypher) and RDF/SPARQL.
- Use cases
- Social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, network and IT topology.
- Anything where the question is “how are these things connected”, across many hops.
- Key traits
- 6 replicas of data across 3 AZs; up to 15 read replicas.
- Neptune Analytics for fast graph analytics over large graphs.
- Not to be confused with
- Amazon RDS — relational; multi-hop relationship queries require expensive recursive joins.
- Amazon DynamoDB — key-value; relationships must be modeled and traversed by your application.
- Exam signal
- “Highly connected data”, “relationships”, “recommendation engine” → Neptune.