Sweet spot use cases of Neo4j

Like with many software engineering tools, Neo4j, too, has its sweet spot use cases--specific types of uses where the tool really shines and adds a lot of value to your process. Many tools can do many things, and so can Neo4j, but only a few things can be done really well by a certain tool. We have already addressed some of this in the previous chapter. However, to summarize specifically for the Neo4j database management system, I believe that there are two particular types of cases, featuring two specific types of database queries, where the tool really excels.

Complex join-intensive queries

We discussed in the previous chapter how relational database management systems suffer from significant drawbacks, as they have to deal with more and more complex data models. Asking these kinds of questions of a relational database requires the database engine to calculate the Cartesian product of the full indices on the tables involved in the query. This computation can...