Book Image

Learning Neo4j 3.x - Second Edition

By : Jerome Baton
Book Image

Learning Neo4j 3.x - Second Edition

By: Jerome Baton

Overview of this book

Neo4j is a graph database that allows traversing huge amounts of data with ease. This book aims at quickly getting you started with the popular graph database Neo4j. Starting with a brief introduction to graph theory, this book will show you the advantages of using graph databases along with data modeling techniques for graph databases. You'll gain practical hands-on experience with commonly used and lesser known features for updating graph store with Neo4j's Cypher query language. Furthermore, you'll also learn to create awesome procedures using APOC and extend Neo4j's functionality, enabling integration, algorithmic analysis, and other advanced spatial operation capabilities on data. Through the course of the book you will come across implementation examples on the latest updates in Neo4j, such as in-graph indexes, scaling, performance improvements, visualization, data refactoring techniques, security enhancements, and much more. By the end of the book, you'll have gained the skills to design and implement modern spatial applications, from graphing data to unraveling business capabilities with the help of real-world use cases.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Key concepts and characteristics of Neo4j


Before we dive into the details of Neo4j, let's take a look at some of the key characteristics of Neo4j as a graph database management system, specifically. Hopefully, this will immediately point out and help you get to grips with some of the key strengths as well.

Built for graphs from the ground up

Like many open source projects and open source NoSQL database management systems, Neo4j came into existence for very specific reasons. Scratching the itch, as this is sometimes called. Grassroots developers who want to solve a problem and are struggling to do so with traditional technology stacks decide to take a radical, new-found approach. That's what the Neo4j founders did early in the 21st century--they built something to solve a problem for a particular media company in order to better manage media assets.

In the early days, Neo4j was not a full-on graph database management system; it was more like a graph library that people could use in their code...