Introducing and Installing Neo4j
Graph databases in general, and Neo4j in particular, have gained increasing interest in the past few years. They provide a natural way of modeling entities and relationships and take into account observation context, which is often crucial to extract the most out of your data. Among the different graph database vendors, Neo4j has become one of the most popular for both data storage and analytics. A lot of tools have been developed by the company itself or the community to make the whole ecosystem consistent and easy to use: from storage to querying, to visualization to graph data science. As you will see through this book, there is a well-integrated application or plugin for each of these topics.
In this chapter, you will get to know what Neo4j is, positioning it in the broad context of databases. We will also introduce the aforementioned plugins that are used for graph data science.
Finally, you will set up your first Neo4j instance locally if you haven’t done so already and run your first Cypher queries to populate the database with some data and retrieve it.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:
- What is a graph database?
- Finding or creating a graph database
- Neo4j in the graph databases landscape
- Setting up Neo4j
- Inserting data into Neo4j with Cypher, the Neo4j query language
- Extracting data from Neo4j with Cypher pattern matching
