Hello all!

[RoswellMiner]

I am a Miner hunting for truth and came across neo4j in my virtual travels. I hope to connect with as many of you as needed and hope your searches are fruitful and
interesting.

[brentPhillips]

It's a pleasure to meet Roswell. There is definitely truth here, but it will take your mining skills to unearth all of it 😉

[RoswellMiner]

Thank you, Brent - I have spent the past couple of days getting setup.

I tried installing Enterprise on Mac - I ran into trouble with the JVM - there really wasn't clear explanations without googling to figure out which JVM, where to download

I'm not sure the initial install includes the default Neo4j databases - I didn't see them in the folders

I tried installing Enterprise on Win 10. Same hassles with JVM install.

So I settled for working in neo4j Desktop app

I went through tutorials, they are very well done.

I'll spend the next week reading some of the Neo books and learning to populate my own databases

So, my first question is: What's the best workflow for designing/populating/querying a new graph database?

I imagine in the early stages:

• there's a lot of using the ETL tool - of course, after you've taken whatever raw data and shaping for the import
• designing the relationships to maximize effectiveness of traversing queries
• you probably save all of your work because if your data model is ill-formed, you'll want to start over but still have all of the snippets you used.

I still don't know what I don't know. Anyway, those are my current thoughts.

Miner

[brentPhillips]

Desktop is gonna be the best thing for you as you start figuring out how to build workflows. But to really get a feel for what Neo is capable of, Sandbox is invaluable. I'd learn the basics of Cypher, then go in Sandbox and choose any of the immersive projects in there. You'll be learning by doing, so your retention will be better and you'll experience a sampling of the different use cases Neo can be used for.

As for "best workflow", there isn't one. Depends on several factors, most notably what your end goal (or business solution) is. I think you hit the nail on the head that you don't know what you don't know. The only thing you need to do now is get your hands dirty, break stuff, then fix it. Then a lot of the questions you have now (and the many more you don't know) will be answered.

I will add this: Neo innovates quickly. So you have to keep current on what's happening. What you couldn't do yesterday, you may very well be able to do tomorrow. This is as dynamic a field (and Neo is as dynamic a company) as there is in tech.