Neo4j is open source, graph database which is written in Java and requires the Java Runtime to run. This article introduces you with the Neo4j graph database and compare it with RDBMS.
An Introduction to Neo4j database
These days graph databases are becoming very popular due its power and simplicity. Graph database are the database system that uses the nodes, edges and properties to represent and store data. The Neo4j is one of the popular graph database that provides many features and also there are commercial plugins to use in the more sophisticated environment.
Some of the graph databases are AllegroGraph, ArangoDB, Blazegraph, IBM System G Native Store, InfoGrid, Oracle Spatial and Graph, Oracle NoSQL Database and many others.
Neo4j is most popular graph database and it can be summarized as:
- Open source database
- Neo4j is schema free database
- Its of the NoSQL database which can be used to store BigData.
- Its graph database
The Neo4j as an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine which store data into the database file in graphs format rather than in tables.
You can download and get the latest information about this database at its official website at http://neo4j.com/.
Comparing Neo4j graph database with RDBMS
Graph database such as Neo4j store the data in the form or graph while RDBMS stores the data into rows and columns of a table. Graph database uses graph and stores data into nodes, edges and properties format.
Following table compares RBDMS with a Graph Database:
| Sr. No. | RDBMS | Graph Database |
| 1. | Tables | Graphs |
| 2. | Rows | Nodes |
| 3. | Columns and Data | Properties and its values |
| 4. | Constraints | Relationships |
| 5. | Joins | Traversal |
History of Neo4j
First version of Neo4j was released in Feb 2010, second version of Neo4j 2.0 was released on Dec 2013 and the current version Neo4j 2.13 was released in April 2014.
Power of Neo4j Database
Neo4j graph database is transactional database and it supports the ACID properties. It can store huge data set, following table shows the data limit of Neo4j 2.1.3 database:
| Sr. No. | Types of Data | Capacity |
| 1. | Nodes | Around 35 billion |
| 2. | Relationships | Around 35 billion |
| 3. | Labels | Around 275 billion |
Neo4j database can be used to develop the enterprise applications which can store huge dataset.
In the next article we will learn how to download and run the Neo4j database on a windows computer.
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