It depends on your use case. SDN works well when you are already running Spring and have a rich domain model that you want to display on the chart. An SDN works well in all cases where you primarily work with the results of several hundred or thousands of POJOs that must interact with existing libraries, ui layers, or other parts of the application that deal with POJOs.
If you do not work in the Spring environment, it is up to you, this adds some complexity to the settings and dependencies. There are also other solutions like jo4neo or Tinkerpop Frames that work on top of Neo4j.
This is slower than the Neo4j native API due to the introduced indirection.
For maximum performance, you can always opt out of the Neo4j API.
In general, the Core-API is the fastest, while there is a good cypher-query language that is very expressive.
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