Learning Neo4j 3.x - Second Edition

The dense node pattern

We have already discussed how graph queries work in a graph database system. The basic principle was that of a graph local query: starting at a (set of) well-defined starting point(s) and then crawling out from there. The traversal speed is typically very fast and only dependent on the number of parts of the graph that the query will touch or traverse through. Typically, traversal speeds are also very constant with growing dataset sizes, simply because in a normal graph model, everything is not connected to everything. The query will only evaluate the parts of the graph that are connected to the starting points, and therefore, the traversal speeds will be flat.

A very interesting problem that occurs in datasets is where ...