Neo4j – key concepts and characteristics

Before we dive into the details of Neo4j, let's take a look at some of the key characteristics of Neo4j specifically as a graph database management system. Hopefully, this will immediately point out and help you get to grips with some of the key strengths as well.

Built for graphs, from the ground up

Like many open source projects and many open source NoSQL database management systems, Neo4j too came into existence for very specific reasons. Scratching the itch, as this is sometimes called. Grassroots developers who want to solve a problem and are struggling to do so with traditional technology stacks, decide to take a radical, new-found approach. That's what the Neo4j founders did early on in the 21st century—they built something to solve a problem for a particular media company in order to better manage media assets.

In the early days, Neo4j was not a full-on graph database management system—it was more like a graph...