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

Chapter 4. Getting Started with Cypher

Cypher is the query language (QL) of Neo4j. Database systems need query languages in order for humans and software applications to interact with them in an efficient way. There are a number of graph query languages out there already (Gremlin, GraphQL and SparQL, to name a few), and some of these have certainly inspired the creation of Cypher, but Cypher is quite different than anything else you may have come across before. No book on Neo4j would be complete without at least spending some time on it--in spite of the fact that there are entire books, presentations, and courses available for you to review. Of course, we will do more than just get started.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Writing the Cypher syntax
  • Key attributes of Cypher
  • Being crude with the data
  • Key operative words in Cypher
  • Syntax norms
  • More that you need to know
  • The Cypher refcard
  • The openCypher project