Journeys into new technologies take work, and in this book, our journey will extend your current knowledge of building relational database applications to demonstrate how you can solve complex data problems by building graph databases and graph-backed applications. In this first part, we ease into your journey by establishing concepts, terms, and processes, while highlighting the critical differences required when approaching a problem with a graph mindset.

Chapter 1 introduces the core concepts of graphs and discusses the types of problems that are well suited for these models. In chapter 2, we establish a data modeling methodology and build a simple data model for a social network that we’ll use in our example application, DiningByFriends. The next three chapters introduce the most common operations that you’ll use to find and manipulate data in graph databases. We approach these operations in three stages, starting with the basics of moving around a graph in chapter 3. Chapter 4 then covers how to perform basic CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations before extending the work we did in chapter 3 to perform more complex recursive and pathfinding traversals. In chapter 5, we close our introduction by using simple graph operations to examine ways to organize your results. Chapter 6 completes this part by synthesizing the work from chapters 2 through 5 into our working Java application, DiningByFriends.