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

Sweet spot use cases of Neo4j


Like with many software engineering tools, Neo4j, too, has its sweet spot use cases--specific types of uses where the tool really shines and adds a lot of value to your process. Many tools can do many things, and so can Neo4j, but only a few things can be done really well by a certain tool. We have already addressed some of this in the previous chapter. However, to summarize specifically for the Neo4j database management system, I believe that there are two particular types of cases, featuring two specific types of database queries, where the tool really excels.

Complex join-intensive queries

We discussed in the previous chapter how relational database management systems suffer from significant drawbacks, as they have to deal with more and more complex data models. Asking these kinds of questions of a relational database requires the database engine to calculate the Cartesian product of the full indices on the tables involved in the query. This computation can...