In earlier builds, Neo4j had no support for indexing and was a simple property graph. However, as the datasets scaled in size, it was inconvenient and error-prone to traverse the entire graph for even the smallest of queries, so the need to effectively define the starting point of the graph had to be found. Hence, the need for indexing arose followed by the introduction of manual and then automatic indexing. Current versions of Neo4j have extensive support for indexing as part of their fundamental graph schema.
Manual indexing was introduced in the early versions of Neo4j and was achieved with the help of the Java API. Automatic indexing was introduced from Neo4j 1.4. It's a manual index under the hood that contains a fixed name (node_auto_index, relationship_auto_index) combined with TransactionEventHandler that mirrors changes on index property name configurations. Automatic indexing is typically set up in neo4j.properties. This technique removes...