Chapter 5. Indexing the data

This chapter covers

  • Creating and maintaining manual indexes
  • Using schema indexing and auto-indexing
  • Explore trade-offs when creating an indexing strategy

In the previous chapter you saw how easy it is to move between nodes in the Neo4j graph by traversing relationships. Moving between nodes allows you to quickly and easily find connected nodes, such as a person’s friends and the movies they like. Neo4j is optimized to make graph traversal fast, but reducing the number of nodes that needs to be traversed by knowing where to start is important, and it becomes increasingly so as the size of the data set increases.

To determine where to start in the graph, Neo4j uses indexing. An index in a relational database ...

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