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

How to start modeling for graph databases


In this section, we will spend some time going through what a graph database model is. Specifically, we would like to clarify a common misunderstanding that originates from our habitual relational database system knowledge.

What we know – ER diagrams and relational schemas

In a relational system, we have been taught to start our modeling with an Entity-Relationship diagram. Using these techniques, we can start from a problem/domain description (what we call a user story in today's agile development methodologies) and extract the meaningful entities and relationships. We will come back to this later, but essentially, we usually find that from such a domain description, we can perform the following:

  • Extract the entities by looking at the nouns of the description
  • Extract the properties by looking at the adjectives of the description
  • Extract the relationship by looking at the operating verbs in the description

These are, of course, generic guidelines that...