This Week in Neo4j: Visualization, Akamai, House of the Dragon, Geospatial Data, Clustering, Cypher in Neo4j 5, Testcontainers, and More


If you’re a developer building modern applications, you’ve probably heard of GraphQL. The Neo4j GraphQL Library enables rapid API development for cross-platform and mobile applications by tapping into the power of connected data. Best of all, it’s designed to be highly flexible, low-code, and built on open source JavaScript.  

We want to make it even easier for developers by offering a new service for your application’s backend. But first, we need your help defining what a new GraphQL service offering from Neo4j would look like by answering this short, two-minute survey.

Our goal is to take away friction for developers deploying and managing a GraphQL server, and ultimately provide a seamless offering that helps reduce complexities, create a streamlined workflow, and get your application to market faster.


Cheers,
Yolande Poirier

P.S.: Over 100 NODES talks related to graph technology are now available – for free! Check them out!
 

Mananai Saengsuwan has 20+ years of experience as both a front-end and backend software developer. He has worked for several Fortune 500 companies such as Hewlett-Packard, United Airlines, and Ericsson, and he’s written articles about data science and graph analytics. You can follow him on Twitter.

In his NODES 2022 presentation, Mananai demonstrates how to detect spam and the users who generate it on Twitter. Watch it now!


 
VISUALIZATION: Autumn Is Bloom-ing With New Visualization Features
Jonathan Thein describes new features coming in the next update to Neo4j Bloom. There’s a “Show me a graph” preset in Search and a new optional auto-sync in Perspectives. There are useful enhancements to Scenes, too.
 
SECURITY: Mapping Your External Attack Surface With Neo4j and Akamai
Chad Cloes describes an approach to map out and visualize software and infrastructure using Neo4j Bloom. Specifically, discover how Akamai Endpoints (a.k.a. FQDNs) relate to vulnerabilities such as the OpenSSL vulnerability announced last week.
 
GRAPH KNOWLEDGE: Investigate Family Connections Between House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones Characters
Tomaz Bratanic shows us how to interactively search and visualize relationships between characters using a graph database. With a series of well-illustrated steps, clear explanations, and links to code, this tutorial is an introduction to data exploration and analysis with Neo4j.
 
NODES SESSION: Making Sense of Geospatial Data With Knowledge Graphs

William Lyon examines how the open source Neo4j graph database can be used with QGIS and Python for making sense of geospatial data. This is achieved using graph algorithms and graph data visualization while combining data from OpenStreetMap, cadastral data, and public data portals.



SCALING: Easily-Run, Scalable, Fault Tolerant Graph Databases With Neo4j Autonomous Clustering

In this blog, John Stegeman, Graph Database Product Specialist at Neo4j, describes new features in Neo4j 5 that make it easier to run and administer fault tolerant and highly available Neo4j clusters. These features reduce the manual configuration you need to do in cluster setup and maintenance.

CYPHER IN NEO4J 5: Fun With Patterns

Cypher is being enhanced to align with GQL in terms of label expressions, relationship expressions, and graph element filtering capabilities. In this article, Priya Jacob illustrates the new features and optimizations to Cypher in Neo4j 5 such as syntax for label and relationship type expressions.

APPLICATION DEV: Software Testing With Testcontainers Neo4j

Testcontainers is a container-based solution to create configurable and portable test setups. In this video, Gerrit Meier shows how Testcontainers relates to other external systems for running tests.

GEPHI: Meet This Useful Network Analysis Tool

In this blog by Dr. Verónica Espinoza, you’ll learn about Gephi, the free, open source visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Gephi helps data analysts make hypothesis, intuitively discover patterns, and isolate structure singularities or faults during data sourcing.

TWEET OF THE WEEK: @halftep

Don’t forget to retweet if you like it!
 
GOING ON NEXT WEEK

Neo4j Live: Discover Neo4j AuraDB Free with Michael and Alexander is on December 12, 2022.

Neo4j Live: APOC Library Updates is on December 13, 2022.

Full Stack GraphQL Book Club: Chapter 4: The Neo4j GraphQL Library is on December 15, 2022.

We are adding new videos every week! Subscribe to our YouTube channel and get notified about new trainings.



… OF SPECIAL INTEREST
    •  The LeakCanary Project now has Neo4j support so you can import heap dumps into Neo4j and run some graph analysis on top of it.
    • When you have a large number of resources in your K8s cluster, you might lose track of all the relationships between them. Check out the kubectl plugin to visualize Kubernetes resources and relationships. Learn more!
    • Take a look at Christophe Willemsen’s Docker compose example with a Neo4j 5 cluster here
    • It will spin up a Neo4j 5 cluster with three primary and two secondary servers.