Basics: Relationships of nodes where relationship info is the goal

General
1

I am assessing if neo4j would be good for my use case. I'm just beginning to experiment with neo4j and work through some of the example databases.

I want to track where data went in a development environment.

I currently use graphviz to illustrate database content copies and show detail of the most recent copy events.

Each database has an id-number and a name, ID is fixed but the name could change. Copies can occur repeatedly over time and to multiple targets.

I have a csv log file of copy events. Columns are: "source_db_name","source_db_id","target_db_name","target_db_id","state","user_name","sys_created_by","sys_updated_by","date","sys_created_on"

In a graphviz file that would effectively be a hierarchical diagram with a set of original sources, and a tree of copy events where splines are labeled with the detail and nodes are the instance.

Can neo4j display detailed data about a relationship (copy event) ? Can neo4j show just the latest relationship (copy event) for thousands of database copies? If so do I create a node.csv by listing all source and destination names and IDs, and use the log of copy events as relationships?

2

Hi Bill,

you can put as many properties on a relationship as you want to. E.g. when creating a relationship you could directly set them like

CREATE (a:NodeLabel)-[:TYPE {prop1: "...", prop2: 2}]->(b:NodeLabel)

Of course you can also load properties from a CSV file (if you need help with this, I could also send you an example).

If you have some kind of "created_on" property on your relationships you could show the 10 "latest" relationships e.g. by

MATCH (a)-[s:TYPE]->(b)
RETURN s
ORDER BY s.created_on DESC
LIMIT 10

I hope this helped.
Regards,
Elena

3

Yes thank you, I will try those tips myself so I better understand how to use neo4j. Thank you for answering! I will reply later if I can't wrap my brain around it, it's currently completely foreign to me.

4

Hi Bill
Sure you can as Elena indicated.Neo4j is a very good in making relationship between data meaningful
Rgds
Arthur

5

After a few days of creating cypher queries and clearly not understanding neo4j basics, I'm off to the newbie section where I should've started.

Newbie post: Very basic newbie q: Can I use neo4j to graphically show sequential activity from a log?