In this chapter, we wanted to give you a bit of context before diving into the wonderful world of graph databases headfirst. It's a good idea, from an architect's point of view, to understand how graph database management systems like Neo4j came about, what problems they are trying to solve, what they are good at, and what they are perhaps less well suited for.

With that in mind, we are now ready to get our hands dirty, and start with actually playing around with Neo4j, the world's leading graph database.