Book Image

Graph Data Processing with Cypher

By : Ravindranatha Anthapu
Book Image

Graph Data Processing with Cypher

By: Ravindranatha Anthapu

Overview of this book

While it is easy to learn and understand the Cypher declarative language for querying graph databases, it can be very difficult to master it. As graph databases are becoming more mainstream, there is a dearth of content and guidance for developers to leverage database capabilities fully. This book fills the information gap by describing graph traversal patterns in a simple and readable way. This book provides a guided tour of Cypher from understanding the syntax, building a graph data model, and loading the data into graphs to building queries and profiling the queries for best performance. It introduces APOC utilities that can augment Cypher queries to build complex queries. You’ll also be introduced to visualization tools such as Bloom to get the most out of the graph when presenting the results to the end users. After having worked through this book, you’ll have become a seasoned Cypher query developer with a good understanding of the query language and how to use it for the best performance.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Cypher Introduction
4
Part 2: Working with Cypher
9
Part 3: Advanced Cypher Concepts

Graph storage in Neo4j

Before we look into the Cypher syntax to query the data, it is important to understand how the data is persisted as a graph. Data diagram representations give a good idea about how the Cypher queries can be written using the data model. We will take a look at a data diagram and see how it helps us with querying:

Figure 2.1 – Sample graph data diagram

This diagram shows how the data is stored in the database. Each node represents one entity that knows what relationship entities it is connected to and whether they are incoming or outgoing; each property is an entity that is associated with a node or relationship. Each relationship entity knows what nodes it is connected to and the direction of the relationship.

The preceding diagram tells us that a person named Tom owns two addresses. This person lives at one address and rents the other one. A person named Shelley lives at an address that is rented. If you read this diagram from...