Using Neo4j extensions

While Cypher is a very powerful language for expressing graph traversal in a simple manner, it is difficult to implement complex graph analytics or handle different kinds of data effectively. This is where Neo4j extensions come into the picture. Neo4j provides the ability to build and register plugins with procedures that can be invoked from Cypher to perform more complex operations.

In the following screenshot, we can see the plugins available to install for the selected database in Neo4j Desktop:

Figure 11.1 – Plugin management in Neo4j Desktop

Let’s review what these plugins provide in the following list:

• APOC: APOC is short for Awesome Procedures On Cypher and is an add-on library that provides a lot of functions and procedures that add useful functionality to Cypher. We discussed the important features of this extension in detail in Chapter 10, Using APOC Utilities.

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