Why You Should Use Neo4j in Your Next Ruby App

I have needed to store a lot of data in my time and I've used a lot of the big contenders: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Redis, and MongoDB. While I've built up extensive experience with these tools, I wouldn't say that any of them have ever made the task fun. I fell in love with Ruby because it was fun and because it let me do more powerful things by not getting in my way. While I didn't realize it, the usual suspects of data persistence were getting in my way. But I've found a new love: let me tell you about Neo4j.

What is Neo4j?

Neo4j is a graph database! That means that it is optimized for managing and querying connections (relationships) between entities (nodes) as opposed to something like a relational database which uses tables.

Why is this great? Imagine a world with no foreign keys. Each entity in your database can have many relationships referring directly to other entities. If you want to explore the relationships there are no table or index scans, just a few connections to follow. This matches up well with the typical object model. It is more powerful, though, because Neo4j, while providing a lot of the database functionality that we expect, gives us tools to query for complex patterns in our data.

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by Brian Underwood via SitePoint