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 attributes of Cypher


In making Cypher, Neo Technology and Andres Taylor (@andres_taylor) set out to create a new query language, specifically to deal with graph data structures like the ones that we store in Neo4j. There were a couple of reasons for this; more specifically, there are four attributes that are not available together in any other query language out there.

Let's quickly examine these attributes, as they are quite important in understanding the way Cypher works in Neo4j:

  • Declarative: Cypher is a declarative query language, which is very different from the imperative alternatives out there. You declare the pattern that you are looking for. You effectively tell Cypher what you want, not how to get it. This is crucial, as imperative approaches always suppose that you--as you interact with the database--have the following qualities:
    • Are a programmer who knows how to tell the database what to do--probably with some procedural logic that will need to be formalized in a program.
    • Are...