🚀 Getting Started: Reading Data from Neo4j

This guide walks you through the basics of querying data using Cypher, Neo4j’s query language.

We’ll cover how to:

• Retrieve nodes (think: entities like people, movies, etc.)
• Apply filters using properties (e.g., name = “Tom Hanks”)
• Return specific property values
• Retrieve nodes by finding connections (relationships) between nodes
• Use filtering tools like WHERE, IN, ranges, and partial matches to retrieve relevant nodes

All examples are based on the Movies dataset that comes with Neo4j.

The data model being referred in this article is captured below. It refers to the model listed on the graphacademy course.

🧠 What Is Cypher?

Cypher is to Neo4j what SQL is to relational databases. But instead of working with rows and columns, Cypher is designed to work with graphs.

Imagine drawing circles (nodes) and arrows (relationships) on a whiteboard — that’s how your data looks in Neo4j. And Cypher allows you to write queries that look almost like what you’d draw.