Chapter 1. Your First Query with Neo4j

Neo4j is a graph database and has been in commercial development for over a decade. It comes with several flavors, supporting a wide variety of use cases and requirements imposed by start-ups, large enterprises, and Fortune 500 customers. It is a fully transactional database; it supports Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability (ACID) and is also well equipped to handle the complexities introduced by various kinds of systems—web-based, online transaction processing (OLTP), data-warehousing, analytics, and so on.

This chapter will help you to understand the paradigm, applicability, various aspects, and characteristics of Neo4j as a graph database. It will guide you through the installation process, starting right from downloading and running your first Cypher query leveraging various interfaces/tools/utilities exposed by Neo4j against your fully-working instance.

At the end of this chapter, your work environment will be fully functional, and you will be able to write your first Cypher query to insert/fetch the data from the Neo4j database.

This chapter will cover the following points:

• Thinking in graphs for SQL developers
• Licensing and configuring – Neo4j
• Using the Neo4j shell
• Introducing the Neo4j REST interface
• Running queries from the Neo4j browser