This Week in Neo4j – 14 October 2017


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.

Before we get to that, we wanted to say a few quick words.

Our entire team is *so* excited about GraphConnect NYC coming up soon! It’s only a week away before we get to see the entire community come together for GraphHack, training classes, workshops, and a bunch of amazing announcements and in-depth technical sessions. Many developers are speaking about how to build graph apps, and we have in-depth sessions on algorithms, Causal Clustering, AI and much much more. We even have an awesome DevZone at the event with experts from our team on hand to look at your graph models, a lounge to chat with fellow developers, and a special Virtual Reality graph experience.

Register now, with the special TWIN4J 20%-off discount code. We’d LOVE to meet you, hear about what you’re building and help in any way we can.

Cheers,
Mark, Michael, Will, Karin, Ryan, Nir


This week’s featured community member is Axel Morgner, Co-Founder and CEO of Neo4j partner Structr.

Axel Morgner - This Week's Featured Community Member

Axel Morgner – This Week’s Featured Community Member

Structr is a graph-based low-code development and runtime environment for building data-centric web and mobile Applications and uses Neo4j as its backend datastore.

I did a bit of searching on the Structr GitHub repository and found out that Axel has been working with Neo4j since at least version 1.6 back in early 2012.

Structr are sponsors of GraphConnect New York 2017 so you’ll be able to meet Axel and the team on October 24th at Pier 36, NYC.

On behalf of the Neo4j community thanks for all your work Axel!

SDN 5.0 release


For over half a year the SDN/OGM team has been working on new features in Neo4j Object Graph Mapping library (OGM) and Spring Data Neo4j (SDN) framework. You’ll find a number of improvements: better loading strategies, custom id handling, dynamic properties to better support for causal clusters and Spring Data projections.

We are happy to announce the release of OGM 3.0 and SDN 5.0 earlier this month with a detailed blog post.

If you used either library before, make sure to check out our migration guides (OGM, SDN)

We’re also welcoming Gerrit Meier to the Spring Data Neo4j team within Neo4j engineering.

If you are attending GraphConnect, NYC Oct 23-24 you can take the “Building Microservices with Spring” training by Kenny Bastani which will have a section on Spring Data Neo4j 5.0. And make sure to attend the “Spring Data Neo4j 5.0” talk by Nicolas and Gerrit. Also find Nicolas, Gerrit and Michael at GraphConnect for questions and discussions.

From GraphConnect: Real-Time Recommender Systems Made Easy with Neo4j


We didn’t have an online meetup this week so we’ll flash back to one of the most popular talks from GraphConnect Europe 2017 – Real-Time Recommender Systems Made Easy with Neo4j – presented by my colleague Pieter Cailliau.



Pieter talks through his experiences helping Neo4j customers build recommendation engines and shows a library he built to simplify the process.

The online meetup is back this week. Norbert Priening will show us how to analyse Debian packages with Neo4j at the earlier time of 14.00 BST. You can always watch the video afterwards if that’s too early for you!

Ethereum, RDF to Neo4j, Network Automation, BloodHound release


    • Sander created eth_graph, a project which syncs the Ethereum blockchain to Neo4j. It’s still in its infancy but looks like a cool one to keep an eye on.
    • Thomas Vander Wal wrote up his initial experiences learning about graph databases after coming across them in a networks module at university.
    • In how Neo4j could help fighting crime Stefan Schubert compares and contrasts relational and graph models, before going on to show how you might model a crime network in Neo4j.
Netgraph - model IP networks in Neo4j

[L3 SVIs: Yellow] [L2 VLANs: Green] [Switches/Routers: Blue]

    • Netgrph is a project created by Jonathan Yantis that models IP networks in Neo4j for network automation and troubleshooting. Once you’ve loaded your data you can run queries to find paths between devices or find all the devices of a particular type across a network.
    • Matheus Teixeira created rdf2multimodel, a tool that imports RDF triples into Neo4j. The project also has a SPARQL to Cypher adapter.
    • BloodHound version 1.4 was released. BloodHound is a tool that uses graph theory to reveal the hidden and often unintended relationships within an Active Directory environment. This release contains ShortestPath bug fixes and added a feature that allows you to collect properties of objects.

On StackOverflow: Common ancestors, nested union, logging


This week on Neo4j StackOverflow…​

Next Week


What’s happening next week in the world of graph databases?

Date Title Group Speaker

October 15th 2017

Sunday Morning Neo4j GraphGists Project

Philly GraphDB

Jess M

October 16th 2017

Managing inter-component complexity: Securing products with Graph databases

Graph Database – San Francisco

Ravi Krishnaswamy

October 17th 2017

Creating recommendation systems with Neo4j (Brazilian)

Graph Database – São Paulo

Jhonathan Soares

October 19th 2017

Analysing Debian packages with Neo4j

Neo4j Online Meetup

Norbert Preining

Tweet of the Week


My favourite tweet this week was by Paul Götze:

Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!

Cheers, Mark