Foreword
Graphs Are Everywhere, or the Birth of Graph Databases as We Know Them
It was 1999 and everyone worked 23-hour days. At least it felt that way. It seemed like each day brought another story about a crazy idea that just got millions of dollars in funding. All our competitors had hundreds of engineers, and we were a 20-ish person development team. As if that was not enough, 10 of our engineers spent the majority of their time just fighting the relational database.
It took us a while to figure out why. As we drilled deeper into the persistence layer of our enterprise content management application, we realized that our software was managing not just a lot of individual, isolated, and discrete data items, but also the connections between them. And while we could easily fit the discrete data in relational tables, the connected data was more challenging to store and tremendously slow to query.
Out of pure desperation, my two Neo cofounders, Johan and Peter, and I started experimenting with other models for working with data, particularly those that were centered around graphs. We were blown away by the idea that it might be possible to replace the tabular SQL semantic with a graph-centric model that would be much easier for developers to work with when navigating connected data. We sensed that, armed with a graph data model, our development team might not waste half its time fighting the database.
Surely, we said to ourselves, ...
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