Reviewed by Aditya Kumar · Last reviewed 2026-03-24
**What**: Nodes (entities) + edges (relationships). Optimized for traversal. Neo4j, Neptune. **Use Cases**: Social (friends), recommendations (user-item), fraud (transaction networks), knowledge graphs. Cypher: MATCH (a)-[:FRIEND]->(b). **Trade-off**: Efficient multi-hop;...
What: Nodes (entities) + edges (relationships). Optimized for traversal. Neo4j, Neptune.
Use Cases: Social (friends), recommendations (user-item), fraud (transaction networks), knowledge graphs. Cypher: MATCH (a)-[:FRIEND]->(b).
Trade-off: Efficient multi-hop; flexible schema. Not ideal for heavy aggregations. Consider graph layer on relational for simpler cases.
Pro-Move: 'We use Neo4j for fraud—3-hop traversal in 50ms; would be 10s with SQL joins.'
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