Market Leading Graph Database First to Seamlessly Integrate with the Most Pervasive Business Intelligence Platforms

Neo4j, the leader in graph technology, announced the Neo4j BI Connector, the first enterprise-ready driver to bring graph data to the Business Intelligence (BI) market.

The Neo4j BI Connector presents live graph datasets for analysis within popular BI technologies such as Tableau, Looker, TIBCO Spotfire, Oracle Analytics Cloud, MicroStrategy and more.

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Graph databases are gaining popularity because they play a critical role in making sense of complex data relationships across a broad range of business applications.

A recent Gartner report “Predicts 2020: Data and Analytics Strategies — Invest, Influence and Impact” (Gartner subscription required), published 6 December 2019 recommends to, “Apply graph technologies to enrich multiple datasets with semantics and to automate or augment their unification across silos. This allows richer context provisioning and real-time situation awareness for continuous intelligence, all for better decision making.”

The Neo4j BI Connector allows users to analyze graph data alongside traditional data stored in relational or NoSQL databases within familiar BI tools. It also allows users to create the visualizations and dashboards that will help them to extract the hidden value in their data, serving to enrich their traditional SQL-based analysis.

Examples of integrating connected data from Neo4j into analytical workflows include:

Deeper customer insight: A BI analyst trying to understand customer value might identify an individual retail banking consumer as a relatively lower-value client based on a small personal bank account balance. By leveraging relationship information from Neo4j to connect commercial and retail banking data, the same consumer is found to be the CEO of one of the bank’s largest commercial customers and therefore revealed as a high-value customer.

Fraud analysis: An investigator or analyst looking at a dashboard metric such as “Volume of Identified Fraud” in a given period might want to also understand how the fraudulent transactions in that period were related. By using the Neo4j BI Connector, they would be able to better understand how many instances were connected to a given fraud ring, how many were connected to a given bank branch or retail outlet, and more.

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Functionally, the Neo4j BI Connector:

• Is built on the JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) standard;
• Translates SQL (Structured Query Language) into Neo4j’s native, graph-optimized Cypher language;
• Makes connected data insights accessible in real-time to analysts, data scientists, and knowledge workers without the need for scripting or code;
• Is fully supported and ready for enterprise-wide, production deployment.

Keith Hare, who has been active in the SQL standards process since 1988, shared his thoughts on the Neo4j BI Connector.

“While graph databases offer a great deal of power for understanding data, the existing data analysis, visualization, and reporting tools designed for SQL databases are also very useful,” said Hare. “The Neo4j BI Connector makes graph data accessible to existing tools, allowing graph data analysis to be integrated with SQL data analysis, which expands the value of property graph data. This ability to integrate is a good start to allowing organizations to choose the best database for the application.”

Fawad Zakariya, SVP of Business and Corporate Development at Neo4j, explained how more data scientists, analysts and developers can now harness graphs within their go-to data discovery and business intelligence tools.

“The Neo4j BI Connector democratizes access to graph data for millions of business intelligence analysts, representing a market segment valued at well over $20 billion,” said Zakariya. “Neo4j graph data plays an increasingly pivotal role in enterprise innovation and transformation and we continue to invest in our ecosystem to further our product and market leadership as well as meet rapidly growing customer demand.”

Support for the Neo4j BI Connector Release

Dr. Michael Moore, National Practice Lead for Enterprise Knowledge Graphs + AI in EY’s Data and Analytics (DnA) Group, which won the 2019 Graphie Award for Most Valuable Practice, has been part of the early access program for the Neo4j BI Connector.

“Neo4j has always provided great options for enterprise data connectivity with its many language drivers, APIs and data source connectors,” Moore said. “The new Neo4j BI Connector is a huge step forward, helping to establish Neo4j as a fully mainstream data management platform that can deliver graph-based insights broadly throughout the enterprise using commonly available BI tools and workflows. Our team has been testing the Neo4j BI Connector with several popular business intelligence and data visualization tools with great results.  BI power users and analysts can now easily build real-time KPIs and dashboards directly on top of Neo4j, harnessing the superior analytical power of graphs to generate new cross-domain business insights for the whole company.  This completely transforms business analytics.”

Brian Matsubara, Senior Director of Global Technology Alliances at Tableau, explained why the Neo4j BI Connector will be a welcome addition to Tableau customers.

“At Tableau, we have always been squarely focused on helping customers see and understand their data to solve pressing challenges,” said Matsubara. “The Neo4j BI Connector provides enterprise-ready access to live graph data directly within the Tableau platform, enabling our customers to harness the power of real-time connected data insights. This represents an extraordinarily low friction way to explore existing data from alternate points of view and to more deeply understand KPIs.”

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