2024
Neo4j Certified Professional
A short take on Cypher, graph thinking, and why graph databases earn their place next to relational and document stores.
Cypher rewards a different kind of fluency than SQL. Once the pattern syntax clicks — match a node, traverse a relationship, project a property — you start seeing graph-shaped questions everywhere.
The cert covers the parts that matter in production: indexing strategies, query plans, the difference between a node lookup and a label scan, and how to model relationships so that traversals stay cheap as your graph grows.
Worth doing if you ever expect to touch graph data — relational thinking can take you surprisingly far down a wrong path.