We'll start by introducing the GDS plugin. Provided by Neo4j, it extends the capabilities of its graph database for analytics purposes. In this section, we will go through naming conventions and introduce the very important concept of graph projection, which we will use intensively in the rest of this book.
The first implementation of this plugin was done in the Graph Algorithms library, which was first released in June 2017. In 2020, it was replaced by the GDS plugin. The GDS plugin includes performance optimization for the most used algorithms so that they can run on huge graphs (several billions of nodes). Even though I will be highlighting the optimized algorithms in this book, I would suggest you refer to the latest documentation to ensure you get the most up-to-date information (https://neo4j.com/docs/graph-data-science/current/).