Welcome to this week in Neo4j where we round up what’s been happening in the world of graph databases in the last 7 days.
Featured Community Member: Karin Wolok
This week’s featured community member is Karin Wolok, Community Manager at Neo4j!
Karin Wolok – This Week’s Featured Community Member
Karin has been working with the Neo4j community since just before GraphConnect Europe 2017, and jumped straight in at the deep end by organising and running the Developer Zone at the conference energizing attendees and speakers alike.
Attendees were able to view demos, ask questions to Neo4j engineers, and even get Neo4j certified on the spot! We’ll be running the Developer Zone again at GraphConnect New York on 24th October so we hope you can join us.
Since GraphConnect Karin has been busy organising, promoting and running hackathons, meetups, contests, and conferences. This week she was responsible for an amazing turnout at our online GraphQL meetup as well as at the meetups in San Francisco with Salesforce and New York at DigitalOcean . Her endless stream of ideas and activities is really impressive!
Just about to start my Salesforce / StreamSets / Neo4j session at #BASFDUG! pic.twitter.com/FXbjxcQJ52
— Pat Patterson (@metadaddy) August 25, 2017
The New York Meetup at DigitalOcean
On behalf of all the Neo4j community and the developer relations team – thanks for all your amazing work so far Karin!
Want to share the love?
Is there a tool or library that makes your live easier and you love and you use frequently with Neo4j?
Tell others about it in a quick 15 minutes lightning talk at your local or our online Neo4j Meetup
Just fill in our meetup form and let us know what you’d like to talk about.
Online Meetup: Graph of Thrones & GraphQL
We hosted two events as part of the Neo4j online meetup this week.
On Tuesday Michael Hunger hosted a Graph of Thrones with Christophe Willemsen, Will Lyon, and Tomaz Bratanic.
They showed how to use graph algorithms, NLP, and GraphQL with various Game of Thrones datasets.
On Thursday Will Lyon presented Query Graphs with “Graph”QL to our biggest live audience yet – there was a peak of 150 attendees. So thank you to everyone who joined us! If you haven’t seen it, watch the recording below and please like it if it was interesting to you.
Data Lineage, Rules Engines, Debian Package Analysis
- Adolfo Martínez has written an excellent overview of Data Lineage with examples using Neo4j. Adolfo starts with a simple graph model tracking inputs and outputs, and shows how it can be evolved to handle more complex requirements.
- Norbert Preining has started working on a project to Analyse Debian packages with Neo4j. It reminded me of a similar project that Will Lyon created last year to analyse NPM repositories.
- Will has also written a quickstart example tutorial for creating graph visualizations with neovis.js
- Max De Marzi shows how to build an efficient Boolean Logic Rules Engine in Neo4j
- Chris Skardon created a tool to Import Neo4j metrics CSV files into Graphite to make it easier to figure out what’s going on with your database.
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On my StackOverflow travels I came across a really neat use of Cypher’s map projections to add a property to a Neo4j node that would only be seen when it’s returned in a query but would never be stored in the database. You just
RETURN node {.*, extra:someValue} as node. Thanks a lot Bruno Peres for all your impressive StackOverflow answers.
Learning Neo4j
Earnest Chestnut Jr has written an excellent An Introduction to Graph Databases with Neo4j on the Sharp Notions blog.
Hall of Fame player’s Batting and Fielding statistics
Using a baseball dataset, Ernest shows how to build Cypher queries from scratch to the point where we can answer questions such as “Who were this Hall of Fame player’s teammates?” or “What teams did this Hall of Fame player play for?”. And all of this is done inside the Neo4j sandbox!
If you want to get started with Neo4j you can be up and running with your own sandbox instance in just a few minutes.
In a similar vein, Laura Kahn has written about her experiences learning Neo4j over the summer.
The Omics Database Generator
A couple of weeks ago Joseph Guhlin released the Omics Database Generator (ODG) – a tool for generating, querying, and analyzing multi-omics comparative databases to facilitate biological understanding. ODG uses Neo4j’s graph database as the backend.
This week Joseph wrote an article showing how to Use ODG from the Neo4j Web Console. He provides step by step instructions to get up and running and then writes queries to explore gene ontologies and find specific genes.
Next Week
What’s happening next week in the world of graph databases?
- On Wednesday, August 30, 2017 the NoSQL – São Paulo meetup will be hosting a hands on Graph of Thrones – Neo4j + Game of Thrones event.
- Also on Wednesday, August 30, 2017 Dom Davis and I will present at the Neo4j London meetup. Dom will talk about Decyphering your graph model and I’ll show how to Query Graphs with “Graph”QL.
- On Thursday, August 31, 2017 Paul Thomas will present Introduction to graph analytics using Neo4j at the Dublin Insurance Data Analytics meetup.
- Also on Thursday, August 31, 2017 Philly GraphDB will host An Instructional Course for learning to Install & Launch Neo4j.
- Also on Thursday, August 31, 2017 Jesús Barrasa and I will present Analysing football transfers with Neo4j at the Neo4j Online Meetup.
Tweet of the Week
My favourite tweet this week was by Dom Weldon:
Just gonna put it out there…. I ❤️#Cypher with #neo4j An entire controller is just a few lines. Why did I play with ORMs for so long?
— Dom Weldon (@DomWeldon) August 24, 2017
Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.
That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!
Cheers, Mark
