I had a pretty similar experience, in fact. I lost months of work to Neo4J back in 2011 or so.
The purpose was to be the storage backend for ConceptNet, a semantic network that is largish but is far from "big data". The write speed was awful, the stability was awful, the mechanisms for loading in non-toy amounts of data were nearly nonexistent, and I learned what it means to "run out of PermGen".
I hastily aborted the Neo4J plan. I was also burned by RDF triple-stores (they can't cope with small data either) and MongoDB (which seemed to work at first and eventually fell over, for obvious reasons in retrospect).
The graph is now in SQLite plus flat files, which works great. I've concluded by now that the step on the scale beyond "lies" and "damn lies" is "claims about next-generation databases".
The purpose was to be the storage backend for ConceptNet, a semantic network that is largish but is far from "big data". The write speed was awful, the stability was awful, the mechanisms for loading in non-toy amounts of data were nearly nonexistent, and I learned what it means to "run out of PermGen".
I hastily aborted the Neo4J plan. I was also burned by RDF triple-stores (they can't cope with small data either) and MongoDB (which seemed to work at first and eventually fell over, for obvious reasons in retrospect).
The graph is now in SQLite plus flat files, which works great. I've concluded by now that the step on the scale beyond "lies" and "damn lies" is "claims about next-generation databases".