Graph databases are an esoteric but powerful member of the NOSQL family. For highly connected data, graph databases can be thousands of times faster than relational databases, making Neo4j popular for managing complex data across many domains from finance to social, and telecoms to geospatial.

This tutorial covers the core functionality from the Neo4j graph database, providing a mixture of theory and accompanying practical sessions to demonstrate the capabilities of graph data and the Neo4j database. Specifically attendees will learn about:

- NoSQL and Graph Database overview
- Neo4j Fundamentals and Architecture
- The Neo4j Core API
- Indexing
- Neo4j Traverser APIs
- Declarative querying with Cypher
- Graph algorithms
- Solutions architecture: using Neo4j in large systems

Each session (apart from the fundamentals and architecture) will be a mixture of a small amount of theory combined with a set of practical exercises designed to reinforce how to achieve sophisticated goals with Neo4j. The practical parts of the tutorial consist of Koan-style lessons where a specific aspect of the Neo4j stack is presented as a set of failing unit tests which participants will work to fix, gradually becoming more challenging until the attendees are capable of implementing sophisticated graph operations against Neo4j.

Attendees won't need any previous experience with Neo4j or NOSQL databases, but will require some fluency in Java, a little familiarity with a modern IDE, and a basic understanding of JUnit to help complete the lab tasks.