Your path towards Graph Enlightenment starts here:
Neo4j is a graph database. Records are called nodes and the connections between records are first-class citizens called relationships.
Neo4j refers to all of this as a Property Graph — nodes and relationships with key-value properties on both.
Querying is performed through a traversal, using the delightful Cypher query language. It's like a friendly, pattern-matching version of SQL.
That the "relational" in RDBMS is simply a foreign key, a fairly humble reference to another record. Typically the column will be the same as the primary key in the other table, and the constraint will say something about the connection. To provide more information, use a...
Buried in the schema of every relational database on the planet, one or more join tables lurk. While the convention adds valuable information about how records relate, queries across multiple joins on large data sets can cause join pain.
In a graph database like Neo4j, relationships are essential data elements. Down to the bare metal, Neo4j is optimized for managing the relationships between records, resulting in queries that are 1000x faster.
In a graph traversal, only the local data affects the query speed, and because relationships are materialized as actual structures, finding local data is extremely fast. And, it isn't affected by the growth of the entire data set. What happens to your RDBMS join queries when the data set grows?
Thanks to outstanding Neo4j community member Aseem Kishore there is a nice Node.js driver for Neo4j. As a bonus, Aseem also created a template project which we've used as the basis for this project.
You'll need a few things to get started:
Note: Early release API docs now available for Neo4j-Node!
# Start Neo4j
cd ${NEO4J_INSTALL_DIR}
./bin/neo4j start
# clone this project
git clone
https://github.com/neo4j-contrib/node-neo4j-demo.git
# Make it go...
cd node-neo4j-demo
npm install
npm startCongratulations! A fresh clone of the template project will be created for you, ready to use and easily customized for your own clever purposes.
# create an application (remember the assigned name) heroku apps:create # add neo4j add-on heroku addons:add neo4j git push heroku master heroku open
Simple, right? Now you've got a Neo4j+Node.js application deployed in the cloud.
The example application is a simple social network manager. You can add and remove users, then indicate who "follows" who to create a Twitter-like graph.
Try the app: View all users
Once you've tried out using the mini-application directly, you can open Neo4j's web interface to check out the raw data and run some queries.
Check it out live right now:*
*Note that you may get a phishing warning because we've encoded the password in these URLs.
start n=node(*) return count(n);
start n=node(1) match (n)-[:follows]-(m) return m;
start me=node(1) match (me)-[:follows]-(friends)-[:follows]-(foaf) return foaf;
