## What exactly is AuraDB?
AuraDB is a cloud graph database service offered by Neo4j, a startup that specializes in graph technologies. This fully managed database leverages relationships in data, allowing for ultra-fast queries and enabling real-time analytics and advanced generative AI applications. Unlike traditional relational databases, AuraDB stores information in nodes, representing entities, people, and concepts, and captures the relevant context and connections between them. This graph structure enables users to identify complex patterns and relationships that may not be apparent in other databases, perform graph algorithms for tasks like centrality measures and pathfinding, and gain insights for business decisions in milliseconds rather than minutes.
According to Sudhir Hasbe, the chief product officer at Neo4j, AuraDB’s recent upgrade aims to simplify the process of building with the managed graph database. The upgrade brings new capabilities to AuraDB, making it even more user-friendly and powerful.
## New offering includes gen AI copilot and no/low code interactive dashboard builder, among other features
One of the new features introduced in AuraDB is a generative AI copilot. This offering utilizes a large language model (LLM) from OpenAI and provides real-time suggestions, optimizations, and explanations to help users write Cypher queries for extracting insights from their data. The AI copilot takes a natural language query from the user and generates corresponding search phrases or Cypher code based on the context of the user’s database schema. Users can then edit and adjust the generated code before executing it. This feature significantly reduces the time and effort required to write complex queries, enabling users to extract valuable insights more efficiently.
Another addition to AuraDB is NeoDash, a no/low-code interactive dashboard builder. This feature allows enterprise users to quickly create maps, graphs, bar and line charts, tables, and other visualizations. With NeoDash, users can easily understand, analyze, and interact with their data. For example, an organization could leverage its graph database to map active security risks or visualize the real-time supply chain. This empowers users to make data-driven decisions and gain actionable insights from their data.
In addition to these new features, AuraDB also offers advanced security, audit, and compliance capabilities. This includes customer-managed keys for encrypting and protecting data, as well as the ability to stream and audit security logs in real-time. To further enhance performance, AuraDB now has enhanced read capacity, allowing it to process 15 times more real-time data within each cluster without compromising on latency. This improvement has been achieved by adding read-only secondaries to AuraDB, which distribute read-heavy workloads across multiple nodes.
## Significant growth for graph technologies
The upgrade for AuraDB comes at a time when graph technologies are experiencing significant growth and adoption. According to Gartner, graph technologies will be used in 80% of data and analytics workloads by 2025, a substantial increase from the 10% adoption rate in 2021. Graph technologies, such as AuraDB, play a crucial role in building highly performant retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI applications. These applications rely on knowledge graphs (KGs) to represent data held within documents and the metadata relating to the documents. By combining KGs with other AI techniques, RAG applications can improve response accuracy and provide more meaningful insights.
Neo4j aims to capitalize on the growing demand for graph technologies by continuously enhancing and expanding its offerings. To drive the growth of AuraDB, the company has introduced a new pricing tier called AuraDB Business Critical. This tier offers the same features as the premier enterprise offering but at a 20% lower price due to its self-serve nature. Additionally, the flagship plan, now known as AuraDB Virtual Dedicated Cloud, is hosted on dedicated infrastructure with a virtual private cloud and specific networking requirements.
Over the past 12 quarters, AuraDB has gained significant traction, with 30-40% of new Neo4j customers opting for this fully managed database service. In total, Neo4j has acquired over 1,700 customers and serves more than 300,000 developers, solidifying its position as the world’s leading provider of scalable graph technology.
In conclusion, Neo4j’s upgrade to AuraDB brings exciting new features that enhance the usability and performance of the cloud graph database service. With the addition of a generative AI copilot and a no/low-code interactive dashboard builder, users can now extract insights from their data more efficiently and interact with their data in a more intuitive way. As graph technologies continue to gain traction in the market, Neo4j is well-positioned to meet the growing demand with its enhanced and accessible offerings.