This Week in Neo4j – Moving Adobe Behance from Cassandra to Neo4j, New Go Driver, Emil on The New Stack Makers Podcast

This week’s featured community member is opens in new tabDavid Fox, Software Engineer at Adobe.

David has been a member of the Neo4j community for many years and presented opens in new tabConnections Through Friends: The Second Degree and Beyond at GraphConnect 2013.

I first came across David in my role in Neo4j’s customer success team while David was working at opens in new tabSnap Interactive (now PeerStream). David has since presented his experiences there in a talk at the Neo4j New York meetup titled opens in new tabRunning Neo4j in Production: Tips, Tricks and Optimizations.

David now works for Adobe, and is responsible for the backend infrastructure and performance on opens in new tabBehance – a social network for creatives, serving over 10 million members. We’ll cover more about his experience there below.

David also built opens in new tabdevRant – a community especially crafted with the wants and needs of developers in mind – and opens in new tabwrote about his experience using Neo4j as part of that application.

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

As mentioned above, David was opens in new tabinterviewed by Prof. Roberto V. Zicari, about his experience building a new implementation of Behance’s opens in new tabactivity feed feature.

In the first part of the interview David explains how the activity feed feature and some of the limitations they had with their original implementation which was using Cassandra as the underlying storage engine.

He goes on to observe that the full dataset size has been reduced from 50TB when it was stored in Cassandra, down to around 40 GB in Neo4j. They’re also able to power this system using a cluster of 3 Neo4j instances, down from 48 Cassandra instances of equal specs.

As a result of this they ‘ve been able to exponentially decrease the amount of developer-operations staff hours required each month to keep the activity feed running.

Read the full interview

On Wednesday opens in new tabDavid Allen announced the opens in new tabrelease of the Neo4j Graph Platform within a commercial Kubernetes application to all users of the newly renamed opens in new tabGoogle Cloud Platform Marketplace.

This means that users can now easily deploy Neo4j’s native graph database capabilities for Kubernetes directly into their GKE-hosted Kubernetes cluster.

One click Neo4j deployment on GKE

This week opens in new tabEmil Eifrem, Neo4j’s CEO, was opens in new tabinterviewed on The New Stack Makers Podcast.

They talk about the history of Neo4j from its origins solving a problem in enterprise Content Management, through to the release of the Neo4j Bloom last month, and Emil’s vision of the future of Machine Learning and graphs.

You can listen to the interview below.

Based on popular demand our drivers team have been working on a Go driver for Neo4j, and this week opens in new tabreleased its first alpha version.

You can find instructions for using the driver in the opens in new tabneo4j-go-driver GitHub repository, and if you’ve used any of the other language drivers you will find the same familiar API that you’re used to.

The GA for the Go Driver is planned along with the Neo4j 3.5 release later this year. If you want to learn more you can join the #neo4j-golang channel of the opens in new tabNeo4j users slack.

Learn about the Neo4j Go Driver

Creating nodes and relationships with Cypher is really straightforward. It only gets tricky when you have labels, relationship-types or property-keys that are driven by data and dynamic.

The Cypher planner only works with static tokens and in this video opens in new tabMichael shows how APOC procedures come to the rescue here for creating, merging and updating nodes and relationships with dynamic data coming from user provided strings or lists.

Watch the whole APOC series

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

My favourite tweet this week was by opens in new tabIian Neill:

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

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

Cheers, Mark