Before we dive into the details of Neo4j, let's take a look at some of the key characteristics of Neo4j as a graph database management system, specifically. Hopefully, this will immediately point out and help you get to grips with some of the key strengths as well.

Like many open source projects and open source NoSQL database management systems, Neo4j came into existence for very specific reasons. Scratching the itch, as this is sometimes called. Grassroots developers who want to solve a problem and are struggling to do so with traditional technology stacks decide to take a radical, new-found approach. That's what the Neo4j founders did...

Like with many software engineering tools, Neo4j, too, has its sweet spot use cases--specific types of uses where the tool really shines and adds a lot of value to your process. Many tools can do many things, and so can Neo4j, but only a few things can be done really well by a certain tool. We have already addressed some of this in the previous chapter. However, to summarize specifically for the Neo4j database management system, I believe that there are two particular types of cases, featuring two specific types of database queries, where the tool really excels.

We discussed in the previous chapter how relational database management systems suffer from significant...

Neo4j offers different feature sets for different editions of the graph database management system:

• Community Edition: This is the basic, fully functional, high-performance graph database.
• Enterprise Edition: This adds a number of typical Enterprise features to
  the Community Edition: clustering (for high availability and load balancing), advanced monitoring, advanced caching, online backups, and more. Neo Technology has a number of additional features lined up on the Enterprise Edition road map.

Most users of Neo4j start off with the Community Edition, but then deploy into production on the Enterprise Edition.

For the slightly more complicated bit, Neo Technology has chosen very specific licensing terms for Neo4j, which may seem a tad complicated but which actually really support the following goals:

• Promoting open source software
• Promoting community development of Neo4j
• Assuring long-term viability of the Neo4j project by providing for a revenue stream

This is achieved in the following ways:

• The Community Edition uses the GNU Public License Version 3 (GPLv3)
  as its licensing terms. This means that you may copy, distribute, and modify the software as long as you track changes/dates of in-source files and keep modifications under GPL. You can distribute your application using a GPL library commercially, but you must also provide the source code. It is therefore a very viral license and requires you to open source your code--but only if your code directly...

In this section, we will take you through the first couple of steps that you need to take to get started with Neo4j. These steps are quite a bit different on different platforms; therefore, we will be going through the different options one by one and looking at the common steps. For most, this will be a simple step, but it's an important one that we cannot afford to skip.

Like on any platform, installing Neo4j starts with downloading the latest version from the Neo4j website, http://www.neo4j.org/download, where the most recent versions can be found (see the following picture):

In this section, we are going to address a third and alternative way of getting started with the Neo4j graph database management system--using a cloud solution. As it turns out, you can try out the power of the database solution without even having to go through the previously mentioned steps of installing the product on an operating system of your own. You can just use a graph as a service solution; there are multiple providers out there. At the time of writing this, you can use solutions from the following:

• GrapheneDB
• Heroku
• GraphStory
• GraphGrid
• Azure
• A roll your own solution on CleverCloud, OVH, Google Cloud Platform, OpenShift, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and so on, is possible as well

Therefore...