decreasing popularity are neo jorientdband titan to showcase our case study we'll choose the most popular one at the moment of writing (see com/en/ranking/graph+dbmsseptember neo is graph database that stores the data in graph containing nodes and relationships (both are allowed to contain propertiesthis type of graph database is known as property graph and is well suited for storing connected data it has flexible schema that will give us freedom to change our data structure if neededproviding us the ability to add new data and new relationships if needed it' an open source projectmature technologyeasy to installuser-friendlyand well documented neo also has browser-based interface that facilitates the creation of graphs for visualization purposes to follow alongthis would be the right moment to install neo neo can be downloaded from now let' introduce the four basic structures in neo jnodes--represent entities such as documentsusersrecipesand so on certain properties could be assigned to nodes relationships--exist between the different nodes they can be accessed either stand-alone or through the nodes they're attached to relationships can also contain propertieshence the name property graph model every relationship has name and directionwhich together provide semantic context for the nodes connected by the relationship properties--both nodes and relationships can have properties properties are defined by key-value pairs labels --can be used to group similar nodes to facilitate faster traversal through graphs before conducting an analysisa good habit is to design your database carefully so it fits the queries you' like to run down the road when performing your analysis graph databases have the pleasant characteristic that they're whiteboard friendly if one tries to draw the problem setting on whiteboardthis drawing will closely resemble the database design for the defined problem thereforesuch whiteboard drawing would then be good starting point to design our database now how to retrieve the datato explore our datawe need to traverse through the graph following predefined paths to find the patterns we're searching for the neo browser is an ideal environment to create and play around with your connected data until you get to the right kind of representation for optimal queriesas shown in figure the flexible schema of the graph database suits us well here in this browser you can retrieve your data in rows or as graph neo has its own query language to ease the creation and query capabilities of graphs cypher is highly expressive language that shares enough with sql to enhance the learning process of the language in the following sectionwe'll create our own data using cypher and insert it into neo then we can play around with the data