Hello from Amsterdam!
I’m new here, but I’ve been using neo4j quite a lot for the past 6 years. The first time I used it, I was working on a prototype for an application connecting tons of data from different systems. Originally we used a SQL DB, but the many and variable number of JOINs necessary to connect everything made it extremely slow, so we quickly decided to use neo4j instead.
I wrote a ton of extremely complex queries that project, and neo4j always stayed very fast, and made it easy to explore the data and figure out new interesting relations to present to users.
After that, I joined a project that was already using lots of neo4j databases. In fact, it was more of a platform on which users could launch their own neo4j instance to load data into and model it for their own purposes. We provided tools. I didn’t write a lot of queries there, but I wrote a lot of plugins, including a Validation plugin that basically enforced a database schema based on a flexible user-defined taxonomy; as well as a plugin that would export data from the graph according to a user-defined config to Excel, allow users who know nothing about the graph structure to edit and add values, and then import it back into the database according to a hideously complex algorithm, updating existing values and creating new nodes and relations as necessary. Tons of fun.
Now I’m starting on my third neo4j project, and this time the focus is on showing users the graph, but in a way that makes it easy to navigate and explore, according to specific filters and criteria relevant to the user. Graph visualization is extremely important for this, so I’m mostly here to explore visualization options. I already posted a question about the Neo4j Visualization Library in the Visualization forum.