Nodes, Relationships, and Properties
Understand the building blocks of a graph: nodes (entities), relationships (connections), and properties (attributes) that describe them.
Graph Building Blocks
Welcome to Cypher Fundamentals! To query a graph database like Neo4j, you first need to understand its core components.
Think of graphs as powerful ways to model real-world connections. They are built from three main elements:
- Nodes: Your entities or 'things'
- Relationships: How those 'things' are connected
- Properties: Descriptors for nodes and relationships
Nodes: The Nouns of Your Graph
Nodes are the fundamental entities in your graph. They represent real-world objects, people, places, or concepts.
For example, in a social network, 'Alice' or 'New York' would be nodes. In an e-commerce graph, 'Product A' or 'Customer B' would be nodes.
Nodes can have labels to categorize them, like 'Person' or 'City'.
All lessons in this course
- Nodes, Relationships, and Properties
- Creating Data with Cypher CREATE
- Matching Patterns with Cypher MATCH
- Returning and Shaping Results with RETURN