Neo4j

Graph .vs Relational Databases

What Is a Relational Database?

• Power horse of software applications since the 80s

• Store highly structured data in tables, rows and columns

• Require developers to strictly define their data

• Relationships are made by referring to primary keys and

foreign keys
Examples Of Relational Databases

• MySQL

• PostgreSQL

• Oracle

• Microsoft SQL Server

• SQLite

• MariaDB
JOIN Statements

• When using MANY-to-MANY statements, a JOIN table must be used

• Holds foreign keys of both tables

• These operations weigh heavily on memory and other resources

• Data can be denormalised to reduce joins

When To Use Relational Databases

• Large but “simple” data structures

• Not many relationships / connections

• Relationships do not need to be stored

• Data not expected to greatly scale

When To Use Graph Databases

• Need to Scale

• Data that is highly interconnected (Friends of Friends)

• Data that can easily be visualized

• High performance data

SQL vs. Cypher
Relational Database -> Graph
Importing Data From A Relational DB

Easiest way is to create a CSV dump of individual entity-tables and

And join tables

Then take the CSV file and use Cypher’s LOAD CSV tool

This will ingest the data, accessing columns by header name or

offset and match existing nodes based on attribute lookups