Chapter 1. Getting Started with Neo4j

Graphs and graph operations have grown into prime areas of research in computer science. One reason for this is that graphs can be useful in representing several, otherwise abstract, problems in existence today. Representing the solution space of the problem in terms of graphs can trigger innovative approaches to solving such problems. It's simple. Everything around us, that is, everything we come across in our day-to-day life can be represented as graphs, and when your whiteboard sketches can be directly transformed into data structures, the possibilities are limitless. Before we dive into the technicalities and utilities of graph databases with the topics covered in this chapter, let's understand what graphs are and how representing data in the form of graph databases makes our lives easier. The following topics are dealt with in this chapter: