posted 9 years ago
Jacek
The book does actually cover some (though not all) of the enterprise level features in Neo4j, including things like the hot/online backups and high availability (HA aka clustering). The core graph functionality provided by the community and enterprise editions are the same and it is pretty easy to swap / upgrade from community to enterprise if/when you choose to. You would consider the enterprise edition if for example you had a mission critical app where you wanted to ensure your DB could handle fail over, i.e. if one node goes down, another one could take over. With the community edition there is only ever one instance, whilst the enterprise edition allows you to run multiple. The enterprise edition also provides the ability to take backups whilst the DB is running (no downtime) whilst with the community edition this would typically require a shutdown, backup and then restart. Also the enterprise edition also comes with 24/7 production support which is sometimes important for companies. So basically if you are after these enterprise level features then the enterprise edition may be for you.
Having said that, there are a fair few people out there still happily running on community edition too.
Nicki