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Kristian
Kristian

Reputation: 21830

Neo4j quick lookup of string within property of many nodes

I'm using neo 2.2.2 and i'm currently using Regex search to find a string in the name property over 600k nodes.

Each node is structured with a minimum of the following two properties.

{
  name: 'some string of text',
  sid: 12345
}

I've created an index on name and another index on sid. Lookups on sid are very fast. Searches [using regex] are very slow. Currently I'm searching for a string with a * before and after.

What can be done with neo to make searching for string within a property very fast?

If doing something special within neo is not ideal, I could theoretically standup some supplementary algorithm/service separate from Neo4j that searches for a string value within the name property, and then gives me the sid, which then is used to look up the node within neo.

Help me do fast string search with neo4j, please. :)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 187

Answers (2)

MicTech
MicTech

Reputation: 45043

In general Regexes are very expensive. From my point of view, you should find another solution for that.

Could you please tell us more about your use case and why you want to use Regex?

One solution for that you already suggest. Store SID and Name in another format (or database), which has better performance for Regex searching than Neo4j.

Or do some analysis of name property content and base on that create representation of the content as a graph.

e.g.
* Node for a count of letters in name property
* Node for starting letter
* Split name property to multiple properties
* etc...

Upvotes: 1

cybersam
cybersam

Reputation: 67009

You can use legacy fulltext indexing to speed up your search. This blog shows you how.

Upvotes: 1

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