Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 5, 2013

Beginning with Neo4j and Neo4jClient

Filed under: Graphs,Neo4j — Patrick Durusau @ 7:56 am

Beginning with Neo4j and Neo4jClient by Cameron J. Tinker.

From the post:

I will try my best to include everything necessary to get started with Neo4j. This is not meant to be a guide on how to program with C#, Visual Basic, Java, Cypher, or Gremlin. You will need to either have prior experience with those languages or read other resources to learn about them. If you don’t understand some of the computer science jargon, please let me know and I will try and make the wording more clear.

I’m not going to go into too much graph theory in this tutorial. You should have a basic understanding of what a directed graph is and how to create a data model since you seem to be interested in graph databases. All that you really need to know about graph theory is that a graph is a set of related nodes representing entities with relationships connecting the nodes.

Graph databases are an excellent way to model social data compared traditional relational databases. Social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook use graph dbs for quickly querying through millions of users and their relationships to other objects or users. It would be much slower to use an RDBMS for a website like Facebook because of the need to select from tables with millions of records and perform joins on those tables. Joins are expensive operations in SQL databases and graph databases don’t require explicit joins due to the nature of a graph’s structure.

Old hat to most of you but a useful summary to pass along to others where basic questions come up.

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