This Week in Neo4j – 21 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.

GraphConnect NYC 2017


It’s GraphConnect week! The main event is on October 24th 2017 at Pier 36, NYC.

If you’re coming don’t forget to come to the DevZone and say ‘hi’.

GraphConnect - October 23rd-24th 2017

GraphConnect – October 23rd-24th 2017

There are lots of great talks scheduled and I’m particularly looking forward to these ones:


This week’s featured community member is Tim Ward, CEO of CluedIn – a knowledge management solution that helps you utilise the collective knowledge in your organisation.

Tim Ward - This Week's Featured Community Member

Tim Ward – This Week’s Featured Community Member

Tim has been using Neo4j for the last 6 years and presented his experience scaling Neo4j at FooCafe in 2015.

Tim has been leading the charge in the machine learning/graphs arena and presented Using Neo4j and Machine Learning to Create a Decision Engine to a packed room at GraphConnect Europe 2017. Apart from Emil’s keynote this has been the most viewed video from the conference.

Tim will present Building the Connected Enterprise with Machine Learning and Neo4j at GraphConnect NYC. His talk is at 11:45.

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

Online Meetup: Analysing Debian packages with Neo4j


In this week’s online meetup Norbert Preining showed us how to load the Debian UDD into Neo4j and write Cypher queries to explore dependencies between packages.



The code from Norbert’s talk is available on GitHub and he’s also done a brief writeup on his blog.

FOSDEM call for participation, Spring Boot, Dr Jim Webber interview


    • App Developer Magazine have an interview with Neo4j’s Chief Scientist Dr Jim Webber in which he explains how graph databases fit in the NoSQL landscape, why native graph databases such as Neo4j are most efficient for querying graph data, and how the Panama Papers helped project graph databases into the mainstream.
    • Ali Ince released version 1.5.0 of the Neo4j Python Driver. The 1.5 series uses a least connections load balancing strategy when interacting with clusters and adds configuration options to give the application developer more control.
    • The call for participation for the GraphDevRoom at FOSDEM 2018 is now open. This is the 6th edition of the GraphDevRoom and suggested topics for this year range from graph query languages to knowledge graphs, and from graph processing frameworks to large scale graph visualisation. I attended and spoke in 2015 and found it a very welcoming environment so I’d encourage you to submit your interesting ideas.
    • Tyler Bobell shows how to combine Neo4j & MySQL in the same Spring Boot application. There’s lots of code examples and a GitHub repository to go with it.
    • Niklas Saers released version 3.2.0 of Theo, the Swift Neo4j driver. The driver now has support for Swift 3 & 4.

From The Knowledge Base


This week from the Neo4j Knowledge Base we have an article explaining how the query plan cache works.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you execute Cypher queries in Neo4j this will answer many of your questions.

GraphQL Summit


Neo4j will be sponsoring GraphQL Summit in San Francisco on October 25th and 26th.

GraphQL Summit - October 25th-26th 2017

GraphQL Summit – October 25th-26th 2017

My colleagues Michael Hunger and Will Lyon will be there and will be giving demonstrations of how to build GraphQL APIs backed by Neo4j and showcase some of the integrations we’re building for working with GraphQL and Neo4j at the booth.

Register here with promo code NEO4JFAN for a 25% discount to GraphQL Summit.

Tweet of the Week


My favourite tweet this week was by QuantumBIS:

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

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

Cheers, Mark