What is Neo4j?

Neo4j is built from the ground up to leverage not only data, but also data relationships.

Neo4j is designed around a simple, yet powerful optimization. Each data record, or “node,” contains direct pointers to all the nodes that it’s connected to.

Because of this basic principle, Neo4j doesn’t need to compute the relationships between your data at query time. The connections are already there, stored right in the database. Because of this, queries of densely connected data are orders of magnitude faster.

Other databases don’t save direct pointers between records. They need to compute connections by searching through a separate data structure, called an index. This makes them inherently slower than Neo4j for relationship-intensive queries.