This article provides a brief introduction to Neo4j and attempts to show why developers like graph databases by reviewing the following:

• The benefits to using a graph database instead of a relational database for certain problem domains
• The performance difference between SQL JOINs and graph traversals for those problem domains
• The internal representation of data as nodes and relationships in Neo4j, including the fact that both nodes and relationships can contain a set of key/value pairs that represent the data
• The three types of traversal options to retrieve data from Neo4j: Core Java API, Traversal API, and Cypher

Read the full article at about:virtualization.