This Week in Neo4j – Neo4j ETL Tool Tutorial, Release of JDBC Driver, Neo4j on AWS Marketplace

This week’s featured community member is David Meza, Chief Knowledge Architect at NASA.

David has been part of the Neo4j community for several years and is best known for his work building a graph of the public NASA Engineering Network lesson learned database, which he wrote about in July 2015. He was also interviewed about his work on the Graphistania podcast.

David’s How NASA Finds Critical Data Through a Knowledge Graph talk at GraphConnect San Francisco 2016 was one of the most popular at the conference. You can also find the slides from David’s talk.

David was interviewed as part of the Forbes article Why NASA Can Now Visualize Its Lessons Learned and was also interviewed as part of our 5 minute interview series.

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

Jennifer Reif has written a detailed post explaining how to use the Neo4j ETL Tool from the Neo4j Desktop.

Jennifer starts by showing how to enable the tool via an activation key , and then imports the Northwind dataset from a PostgreSQL relational database into Neo4j.

If you’d like to get an activation key send us an email devrel@neo4j.com and we’ll send one over.

Will Lyon wrote a blog post in which he shows how to build an application that makes use of the temporal and geospatial data types that were introduced in Neo4j 3.4.

Will takes us through the steps to build a React.js dashboard type application that allows a user to search for businesses by location that have reviews within a certain date range and display some charts based on aggregations of these reviews.

You can find the code for this project on Github and try it live here.

Rik has also been exploring how to use the spatial data type to locate breweries in the Open Beer Database.

Dave Bechberger shared the slides from his NDC Oslo 2018 talk – A Practical Guide to Graph Databases.

If you’re just getting into graph databases this is an excellent overview of the field and different tools available.

Aaron Lelevier has been learning about Graph Theory and has written a blog post in which he distills his learnings.

Aaron explains the different types of graphs, ways of representing them, and shares a project where he built a bidirectional graph of his GitHub followers.

A couple of years ago there was a big story about the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (IMDB), a fund that was created by the Malaysian government to promote economic development through global partnerships and foreign direct investment. The FBI posted a filing to seize their assets under the US Department of Justice and FBI’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative.

There was an article written back in 2016 by The Sinar Project where they explained how they’d used their Popit Database of Politically Exposed Persons helps uncover culprits and hold officials accountable.

This week sweemeng, a member of the Sinar Project, wrote a blog post explaining in more detail how they built the graph, how the data’s organised, and why their method worked for exploring this type of data.

You can find the source code for the data loader in the sinar/popit_relationship GitHub repository.

This week our friends at LARUS released version 3.3.1 of the Neo4j-JDBC driver.

The release has been upgraded to work with recent Neo4j 3.3.x versions and Bolt driver 1.4.6. Work is in progress on Neo4j 3.4.x and drivers 1.6.x.

The main addition has been support for Neo4j clusters, the JDBC driver now supports, routing, read-only transaction, routing-policies and bookmarks for causal consistency.

There are also other improvements including support for in-memory databases, a debug feature to inspect how the driver works when used by third-party tools, and support for TrustStrategy.

If you want to use the Neo4j-JDBC driver in your application, you can depend on org.neo4j:neo4j-jdcb:3.3.1 in your build setup or grab the latest release from GitHub.

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

My favourite tweet this week was by Eddy Wong:

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

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

Cheers, Mark