Neo4j is becoming a standard for graph databases. With its simplicity and potential, you can start building reliable and useful databases. A key feature of Neo4j is the language used both as DDL and DML: Cypher. Cypher is a powerful language that uses clauses similar to SQL. Although, Neo4j is a NoSQL DBMS so Cypher doesn't work on structured data, as SQL does. When you need to query a graph database, you need to define the graph pattern first. A graph pattern is a graphical and logical way to identify the graph resources (nodes and edges) you want to query. You can think of a graph pattern as a subgraph of the whole graph you will query. Cypher uses an ASCII-Art syntax to represent the graph pattern. That's a very good approach because you can graphically think about what you need to query to create the Cypher query. In Cypher, nodes are referred with () and edges with []. One of the simplest graph patterns is the following: (:label_1)-[:type_1]->(:label2) which represents a relationship between two nodes (the first labelled with label_1 and the second labelled with label_2) through an arch whose type is type_1.
In this lab, you will use Cypher to query a Neo4j graph database.
Upon completion of this beginner level lab, you will be able to:
To get the most out of this lab, you should have basic knowledge of the concepts of graph databases and Neo4j. To achieve this, we suggest taking the following labs:
July 7th, 2022 - Fixed environment error