How to use Neo4j in the cloud

Neo4j is an amazingly powerful database. For the right use case it is incredibly fast.

This is how to get up and running:

Sign up to heroku, create an empty project and provision a graphedb database. For small enough databases this is free.

Look in the configuration tab for the connection string url. Keep this secret as it contains the username and password for write access to the graphdb. You can paste this into a browser to give access to the neo4j console.

Now you will want to put some data in. The fastest way is to import from a csv file.

Here is a sample upload script (currently untested):

WITH PERODIC COMMIT 1000 IMPORT CSV FROM http://somewebsite/data.csv AS data MERGE (Test {id: data [0]})

The data must be on a publicly accessible website. I would recommend using an amazon s3 bucket (or a dropbox folder) but use a uuid for the folder name. It only needs to be available for the duration of the import and given that s3 hosted websites don’t expose the directory list function it will be almost impossible to guess.