Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6-6. Nodes and relationships in the object cache
Programmatic APIs
Although the filesystem and caching infrastructures are fascinating in themselves, de‐
velopers rarely interact with them directly; instead, developers manipulate a graph da‐
tabase through a query language, which can be either imperative or declarative. The
examples in this topic use the Cypher query language, the declarative query language
native to Neo4j, because it is an easy language to learn and use. Other APIs exist, how‐
ever, and depending on what we are doing, we may need to prioritize different concerns.
It's important to understand the choice of APIs and their capabilities when embarking
on a new project. If there is any one thing to take away from this section, it is the notion
that these APIs can be thought of as a stack, as depicted in
Figure 6-7
: at the top we prize
expressiveness and declarative programming; at the bottom we prize precision, imper‐
ative style, and (at the lowest layer) “bare metal” performance.
