Neo4j: Friends Edition

Creating a simple graph database using Neo4j in less than 10 minutes.

Simply, a graph database is a database that pays equal attention to the data and the underlying relationships. It is a collection of relationships that uses graph structures for semantic queries to represent and store data. You can refer to my previous posts about graphs and graph databases for mote detail. In this post, we will walk through downloading and creating a simple graph database using the Neo4j.

What is Neo4j?

Neo4j is an open-source, non-relational (NoSQL), and native graph database that provides an Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) compliance backend for the applications [1]. It is available on GitHub or as a desktop application download. Here are some popular features of Neo4j:

• Native graph database since the data is stored exactly as you whiteboard it,
• Provides full database characteristics like ACID transaction compliance, cluster support, and runtime failover,
• Has a declarative query language called Cypher to query the graph database,
• Provides constant time traversals in big graphs due to the efficient node and relationship representations,
• Has drivers for several programming languages like Java, JavaScript, .NET, and Python,
• Provides visualizations.

Neo4j Setup