For today’s adventure, we want to build a Java microservice that connects to and interacts with graph data in a Neo4j AuraDB Free database. Our data is a trimmed-down version of the Goodreads data set, which includes the book, author, and review information. While books and authors are well-suited for a document database such as MongoDB, once you add reviews to the mix, the nuance of the relationships makes this project better suited for AuraDB. This way, we can utilize relationships between the different entities to improve analysis based on the structure of the connections. While everything we will do here is feasible with other data stores, a graph database dramatically simplifies queries into how entities are connected.

If you are new to graphs, here are some resources: