Why do we need a graph database?
There are plenty of databases in the market and each of them is utilized for different applications. Talking about the old days we used a more traditional database like RDMS(Relational Database Management System). Still, in the modern era, we are now starting to use simple in use and scalable NoSQL databases like MongoDB, GraphDatabase, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc.
Data is like a modern day crude oil that has been subject to various applications. It is very important as it helps to elevate the businesses efficiency, productivity, and even explore new possibilities. We already use data considering our real life examples like Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. They store a lot of data from users and they use it for their future enhancement and also for analyzing data. So now one problem has been raised: how to manage and use these data because it is quite substantial, always scaling, and you have to use this wisely for making the optimum output from them, So new databases come into the light and act like saviors for the many issues. As we all know, to make the data effective and interconnect them we have to make many joins in SQL(RDBMS) and it will be a lot of headache. Also querying will be very slow and inefficient and can not handle many – to – many relations easily. So, we have started to use MongoDB(Document storage), Neo4J(Graph database). Hence, today we will discuss the Graph Database.
It is very efficient with the connection of data and makes a relationship between them with many-to-many relationships.
There are plenty of graph databases in the market like Amazon Nepture, ArangoDB, Orient DB, Janus Graph, and Neo4J. But today we will discuss the Neo4J.
What is Neo4J?
Here are a few things that you need to keep in mind and voila it will be easy for you to understand about Neo4J.
- Neo4J is an open-source NoSQL natively graph database which has been publicly available since 2007. It also follows ACID properties.
- We can use Neo4J both locally and with the cloud, for cloud usage, we have to use AuraDB which has been provided by Neo4J.
- There main four components of Neo4J:
- Nodes: Various nodes in the graph define various entities.
- Relations: We use relations to connect different nodes(entities).
- Properties: Details about the entities which are stored. There are also properties of relationships.
- Labels: Labels are used for querying fast.
Setup for Neo4j(Mac)
- You can download Neo4J from their official website.
- Fill out your information in this form.
- After starting downloading you will be redirected to the Activation key page which you have to copy to start the Neo4J
desktop on your Desktop. - After successfully installing the neo4j onto your system you have to paste the activation key which you have copied at
the time of installation. - After pasting the activation key terms & conditions page will be shown that you have to accept the conditions to continue with neo4j.
- After that procedure you will be redirected to your project panel where there will be a sample Movie Database there will be some sample data provided by neo4j.
- Here in the above example we have taken the example of the user node and we can see here the label is “User” and there are properties like name, id, and userId.
- We can also see data in object format as I have shown in the above screenshot.
- Text format.
- As we use SQL to operate in MySQL, and PostgreSQL here in neo4j we have to use CQL(Cypher Query Language) . We will discuss CQL in the future.
Experience with Neo4j
It was a great experience with neo4j as it is quite robust, reliable, and secure when it comes to handling massive amounts of data. We have implemented Neo4j in some projects too and it works like salt in a russian salad, just fine. As there are two sides to the coin there are also some disadvantages. We can not use neo4j everywhere if there is no need for complex joins and aggregation so there is no need to use neo4.
Also if there is low performance in high write operations there will be difficulty to handle transactions and sessions in neo4j. So choose wisely when choosing the database. It will definitely impact the performance of your server.
Advantages
- It is very useful for corresponding data and also easy to represent.
- As it is a NoSQL database so it is also schema-free so there is no headache to maintain schema like SQL.
- It also takes tremendous advantage of one of the most amazing technologies currently available; the cloud technology.
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Conclusion
The world of data is as massive as its actual size and there are always newer possibilities as well as innovation taking place. Here we mentioned Neo4j as an important alternative to your traditional database due to it being able to handle massive databases with utmost simplicity.
We had a beneficial experience with the database as we utilized it for our mean development and website development expertise. Thank you for reading. We hope this blog provides you with a better understanding of the Neo4J database.
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