How does Neo4j physically store data?

2
votes

I want to present Neo4j as a proposal for one of our customers.

I have some doubts which need to be cleared.

I need to know how Neo4j stores data in a database, the physical representation.

My understanding regarding this is as follows:

  1. Nodes are stored with a pointer to its first relationship, and relationships are stored as double-linked lists (one for start node and one for end node) to be followed when loading from disk.
  2. Each relationship has got two pointers to the next relationship (one for the next relationship for the start node and the other for the end node) so any entity only points to its own next, which when it comes together forms the full list.

But I'm not sure that what I got is correct. Please guide me in this issue.

Regards,
Apurv Khare

1
neo4j

1 Answers

2
votes

You can look in Chapter 6 ("Graph Database Internals") of the free O'Reilly book entitled "Graph Databases", which was written by some folks at Neo Technology.