Book Image

Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week

By : Sudarshan Kadambi, Xun (Brian) Wu
Book Image

Seven NoSQL Databases in a Week

By: Sudarshan Kadambi, Xun (Brian) Wu

Overview of this book

This is the golden age of open source NoSQL databases. With enterprises having to work with large amounts of unstructured data and moving away from expensive monolithic architecture, the adoption of NoSQL databases is rapidly increasing. Being familiar with the popular NoSQL databases and knowing how to use them is a must for budding DBAs and developers. This book introduces you to the different types of NoSQL databases and gets you started with seven of the most popular NoSQL databases used by enterprises today. We start off with a brief overview of what NoSQL databases are, followed by an explanation of why and when to use them. The book then covers the seven most popular databases in each of these categories: MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Redis, HBase, Cassandra, In?uxDB, and Neo4j. The book doesn't go into too much detail about each database but teaches you enough to get started with them. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of the different NoSQL databases and their functionalities, empowering you to select and use the right database according to your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

What is Neo4j?


Neo4j is an open source, distributed data store used to model graph problems. It was released in 2007 and is sponsored by Neo4j, Inc., which also offers enterprise licensing and support for Neo4j. It departs from the traditional nomenclature of database technologies, in which entities are stored in schema-less, entity-like structures called nodes. Nodes are connected to other nodes via relationships or edges. Nodes can also be grouped together with optional structures called labels.

This relationship-centric approach to data modeling is known as the property graph model. Under the property graph model, both nodes and edges can have properties to store values. Neo4j embraces this approach. It is designed to ensure that nodes and edges are stored efficiently, and that nodes can share any number or type of relationships without sacrificing performance.[8]