1. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Andreas Kollegger & Niels De Jong
ROAD TO NODES
Intro to Neo4j & Interactive
Dashboarding with NeoDash

2. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Today we will cover
● What is a graph database?
● How to query a graph database?
● Hands on: Low-code Dashboarding with NeoDash
● Bring your questions!

3. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals

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Macbook
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Nodes

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Macbook
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Nodes
Nodes represent things

6. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Macbook
Product
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Nodes
Nodes represent things
Nodes can be identified by
one or more labels

7. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Macbook
Product
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Nodes
Nodes represent things
Nodes can be identified by
one or more labels
Fragile

8. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Macbook
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Nodes
Nodes represent things
Nodes can be identified by
one or more labels
Nodes can hold properties
as key/value pairs
Fragile

9. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Customer
name: Andreas
email: andreas@neo4j.com
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Relationships
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00

10. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Customer
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Relationships
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00
name: Andreas
email: andreas@neo4j.com

11. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Customer
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Relationships
Relationships connect two nodes
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00
name: Andreas
email: andreas@neo4j.com

12. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Customer
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Relationships
Relationships connect two nodes
Relationships have a type
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00
RATED
name: Andreas
email: andreas@neo4j.com

13. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Relationships have a direction
Customer
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Relationships
Relationships connect two nodes
Relationships have a type
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00
RATED
name: Andreas
email: andreas@neo4j.com

14. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Relationships have a direction
Customer
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Relationships
Relationships connect two nodes
Relationships have a type
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00
RATED
stars: 3
createdAt: 2023-03-22
Relationships can hold properties
as key/value pairs
name: Andreas
email: andreas@neo4j.com

15. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.

16. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer

17. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer

18. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer
(c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)

19. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer
(c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)

20. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer
(c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)

21. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer
(c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)

22. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer
(c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)

23. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer
(c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)

24. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph Database
Fundamentals
Cypher
Introduction to Cypher
Cypher is a declarative language that allows
you to identify patterns in your data using
an ASCII-art style syntax consisting of
brackets, dashes and arrows.
Product
RATED
Customer
(c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)

25. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
name: Adam
email: adam@neo4j.com
Graph Database
Fundamentals
The MATCH clause
Product
name: Macbook Pro
price: 2699.00
RATED
stars: 3
createdAt: 2023-03-22
MATCH (c:Customer)-[r:RATED]->(p:Product)
RETURN c.name AS customer, p.name AS product, r.stars
AS rating
Customer
name: Andreas
email: andreas@neo4j.com

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Building Neo4j Dashboards with
NeoDash
Niels de Jong

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What’s next?
Now that we have an understanding of Cypher, let's create a dashboard to
visualize our graph!

28. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
What is NeoDash?
NeoDash is an open-source, low-code Dashboard Builder for Neo4j. It
lets you build an interactive dashboard with tables, graphs, bar charts,
line charts, maps and more, in minutes.
👤
>1000 monthly
users
🌎
Used in
>100 countries
⭐
Used by dozens of
companies worldwide
󰟾
Neo4j Labs Project*
*Neo4j Labs projects are free, open-source tools that complement the Neo4j product suite. Check out https://neo4j.com/labs/

29. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
The NeoDash Dashboard Editor
NeoDash key features:
- Use Cypher queries to populate reports
- Drag-and-drop interface
- If you know Cypher, you can create a dashboard in a matter of minutes

30. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
An Extendable Framework
NeoDash is fully extendable to:
- Add/customize visualizations
- Add company branding
- Add new functionality
NeoDash
Editor
🧩
Custom user
logic
🧩
Custom
Visualizations
🧩
Rule-based
Styling

31. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Dataset
RecipeNLG:
- 2.2M recipes
- With steps
- And ingredients
- Scraped from
cookbooks.com,
recipe-plus.com,
…

32. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Graph-Chef
With our recipe dataset loaded
into Neo4j, lets use NeoDash for:
1. Creating a search engine for
recipes
2. Avoiding food waste! Look up
recipes with what is in my fridge
3. Identifying common
combinations of ingredients.
What goes well together?
4. Cooking inspiration. Can we
create new recipes by looking at
graph patterns?

33. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Final note before getting started
We will be using Neo4j Aura for this demo.
You can create your own Neo4j Aura instance for free at https://neo4j.io.
You can access NeoDash at https://neodash.graphapp.io.

34. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 1 - Overview
We start off with some simple Cypher queries to analyze the graph.
- Show me the graph schema.
- How many recipes in total?
- How many ingredients in total?
- How many steps in total?
Looking at burgers:
- How many burger recipes?
- How many unique ingredients in burgers?
- How many steps on average to create a burger? Bar chart!
- What is the most complex burger? Graph
- What top 10 ingredients are common across burger recipes? Pie chart!
- Is there a preparation step that burger recipes share?

35. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 2 - Recipes
Moving on to slightly more complex queries, using parameters for interactivity.
Search functionality:
- Show me a graph of all ingredients for ‘Pear Pancakes’.
- Turn it into a searchable widget.
- Show me also a table of ingredients, side-by-side.
- Add a table of steps.
- Try ‘Dutch Pancakes’. Do we see an interesting pattern?

36. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Page 3 - Ingredients
Finally we do some more complex queries to
demonstrate the power of Cypher.
Ingredient search:
- Create a search for ingredients
- Show a graph of recipes with the ingredient
- Common pairings with selected ingredient
Multi-ingredients:
- Change selector to multi-selector
- Fix the graph visualization to work with multiple
parameters
- Suggest ingredient pairings based on the set of
ingredients selected
// Subqueries with post-processing
UNWIND $neodash_ingredient_name as name
CALL {
WITH name
MATCH p=(i:Ingredient)-[:IN]-(r:Recipe)
WHERE i.name = name
RETURN r
}
WITH r, COUNT(r) as count
WHERE count = size($neodash_ingredient_name)
WITH r LIMIT 10
MATCH (r)-[in:IN]-(i:Ingredient)
RETURN r, in, i
// Using subqueries
UNWIND $neodash_ingredient_name as name
CALL {
WITH name
MATCH p=(i:Ingredient)-[in:IN]-(r:Recipe)
WHERE i.name = name
RETURN i, in, r
LIMIT 10
}
RETURN i, in, r
// Even more post-processing!
UNWIND $neodash_ingredient_name as name
CALL {
WITH name
MATCH p=(i:Ingredient)-[:IN]-(r:Recipe)
WHERE i.name = name
RETURN r
}
WITH r, COUNT(r) as count
WHERE count = size($neodash_ingredient_name)
WITH r
MATCH (r)-[in:IN]-(i:Ingredient)
WHERE NOT i.name in $neodash_ingredient_name
RETURN i.name, COUNT(r) ORDER BY COUNT(r) DESC

37. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Wrapping up
We will continue working on this dataset on October 26, at NODES 2023!
The recipe dataset will be published around this time.
Want to try out NeoDash in the meantime?
Visit https://neodash-gallery.graphapp.io for public demo dashboards.