Julian's Polymath Explorations

So, you have an itch to test-drive Neo4j and its Cypher query language.  Maybe you want to learn it, or evaluate it, or introduce colleagues/clients to it.  And you wish for: fast, simple and free! Well, good news: the Neo4j company kindly provides a free, short-term hosted solution called "the Neo4j sandbox" .  Extremely easy to set up and use! This article is part 2 of a growing, ongoing series on Graph Databases and Neo4j Register (free) for the Neo4j "Sandbox" Go to sandbox.neo4j.com , and register with a working email and a password.  That's it! Note that this same email/password will also let you into the Neo4j Community Forums and Support ; the same login for all: very convenient! Launch your instance - blank or pre-populated After registering, go to  sandbox.neo4j.com  , and follow the steps in the diagram below (the choices might differ, but the "Blank Sandbox" should always be there): Too good to be true?  Is there...

You have a general idea of what Graph Databases - and Neo4j in particular - are...  But how to get started?  Read on! This article is part 3 of a growing,  ongoing  series  on Graph Databases and Neo4j   If you're new to graph databases, please check out part 1 for an intro and motivation about them.  There, we discussed an example about an extremely simple database involving actors, movies and directors...  and saw how easy the Cypher query language makes it to answer questions such as "which directors have worked with Tom Hanks in 2016" - questions that, when done with relational databases and SQL, turn into a monster of a query and an overly-complicated data model involving a whopping 5 tables! In this tutorial, we will actually carry out that query - and get acquainted with Cypher and the Neo4j browser interface in the process.  This is the dataset we'll be constructing: Get the database in place If you don't already have a datab...