This Week in Neo4j – Neo4j vs NetworkX, Accessing Neo4j with Spring Boot 2.4, Image Annotation on GCP


Hi everyone,

In this week’s video, Adam Cowley shows off the React Hooks For Neo4j library that he created to make it easier for React users to build graph based applications.

Kristof Neys compares NetworkX and Neo4j, Hantsy shows how to build a Spring Boot application, and we launched the Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark.

And finally, David Allen builds an image annotation pipeline using GCP and Neo4j AuraDB.

Cheers, Mark and the Developer Relations team


This week’s featured community member is Luanne Misquitta, Vice President Of Engineering at GraphAware.

Luanne Misquitta - This Week’s Featured Community Member

Luanne Misquitta – This Week’s Featured Community Member

Luanne is one of the earliest Neo4j community members and has now been using Neo4j for more than a decade.

Luanne did a lot of the early work on Neo4j OGM and Spring Data Neo4j and has been a consistent writer of blog posts over the years.

She has also presented countless training sessions, meetups, and conferences. Most recently, Luanne presented two talks at the NODES 2020 conference:

    • Post-Union processing with Cypher, in which Luanne showed off a much requested language feature.
    • Malt Aware: Discovering what to drink with Neo4j, in which Luanne explained how to build a whisky recommendation engine.

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

Neo4j and Typescript – Using the new useSchema React Hook


Our video this week is from Adam Cowley’s weekly live stream.



In this week’s stream, Adam demonstrates the React hooks for Neo4j library, and in particular how to use the useSchema hook. Adam also creates a useDatabases hook that lets you introspect the available databases on a Neo4j server.

Fire up your Centrality Metric engines: Neo4j vs NetworkX – a drag race, of sorts…


In Kristof Neys’ latest blog post, he stages a drag-race between Python’s NetworkX package and Neo4j’s Graph Data Science library.

Kristof runs Betweenness and Harmonic centrality measures on undirected graphs using both approaches, compares the results, and sees which approach is fastest.

Accessing Neo4j with Spring Boot 2.4


Hantsy has started writing a series of blog posts showing how to use Neo4j with Spring Boot.

In the first post, Hantsy creates the skeleton of a project using start.spring.io, before building a REST API that creates and retrieves data from Neo4j using Spring Data Neo4j.

Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark, Testing Neo4j.Driver, New Graphistania Episode


    • Maya Natarajan & David Allen announced the launch of Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark. Neo4j Connector for Apache Spark is an integration tool that moves and reshapes data bi-directionally between Neo4j and Apache Spark.
    • Cory Waddingham has written a blog post about his experience as a Veteran of the US Navy, and gives his thanks to those working in the armed services.
    • Lju Lazarevic published a list of all the confirmed scheduled NODES 2020 Extended talks on the Neo4j Online Meetup page.
    • Chris Skardon takes us through some of the techniques that he used to test Neo4j.Driver.
    • Rik Van Bruggen published episode 10 of the Graphistania podcast. In this episode Stefan and Rik talk about the NODES 2020 conference, FinCEN files, Graph Databases for Dummies book, and more.

Neo4j AuraDB & PubSub on Google Cloud: Image Annotation


Neo4j AuraDB, Neo4j’s Graph Database as a Service offering, recently launched on the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace, and David Allen has taken it for a test drive.

David shows how to build an image processing pipeline that:

  1. Processes images from a Google storage bucket

  2. Generates annotations using the Cloud Vision API

  3. Writes those annotations into Neo4j via a PubSub topic.

Tweet of the Week


My favourite tweet this week was by Michael Simons:

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