introducing neo ja graph database this query we'll start searching at the node user with the name property "paulnote how the node is enclosed within parenthesesas shown in the code snippet belowand the relationship is enclosed by square brackets relationships are named with colon (:prefixand the direction is described using arrows the placeholder will contain all the user nodes having the relationship of type "knowsas an inbound relationship with the return clause we can retrieve the results of the query match( :user name'paul)-[:knows]->( :userreturn name notice the close relationship of how we have formulated our question verbally and the way the graph database translates this into traversal in neo jthis impressive expressiveness is made possible by its graph query languagecypher to make the examples more interestinglet' assume that our data is represented by the graph in figure country namenew zealand has_been_in has_been_in is_friend_of loves hobby user user country nametraveling namemuhuba nameannelies namemongolia has_been_in likes country namecambodia food namesushi has_been_in likes knows user user namepaul last namebeun namejelme last nameragnar is_born_in country figure more complicated connected data example with several interconnected nodes of different types namesweden