This Week in Neo4j – 26 August 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.


This week’s featured community member is Karin Wolok, Community Manager at Neo4j!

Karin Wolok - This Week's Featured Community Member

Karin Wolok – This Week’s Featured Community Member

Karin has been working with the Neo4j community since just before GraphConnect Europe 2017, and jumped straight in at the deep end by organising and running the Developer Zone at the conference energizing attendees and speakers alike.

Attendees were able to view demos, ask questions to Neo4j engineers, and even get Neo4j certified on the spot! We’ll be running the Developer Zone again at GraphConnect New York on 24th October so we hope you can join us.

Since GraphConnect Karin has been busy organising, promoting and running hackathons, meetups, contests, and conferences. This week she was responsible for an amazing turnout at our online GraphQL meetup as well as at the meetups in San Francisco with Salesforce and New York at DigitalOcean . Her endless stream of ideas and activities is really impressive!


New York Meetup

The New York Meetup at DigitalOcean

On behalf of all the Neo4j community and the developer relations team – thanks for all your amazing work so far Karin!

Want to share the love?


Is there a tool or library that makes your live easier and you love and you use frequently with Neo4j?

Tell others about it in a quick 15 minutes lightning talk at your local or our online Neo4j Meetup

Just fill in our meetup form and let us know what you’d like to talk about.

Online Meetup: Graph of Thrones & GraphQL


We hosted two events as part of the Neo4j online meetup this week.

On Tuesday Michael Hunger hosted a Graph of Thrones with Christophe Willemsen, Will Lyon, and Tomaz Bratanic.



They showed how to use graph algorithms, NLP, and GraphQL with various Game of Thrones datasets.

On Thursday Will Lyon presented Query Graphs with “Graph”QL to our biggest live audience yet – there was a peak of 150 attendees. So thank you to everyone who joined us! If you haven’t seen it, watch the recording below and please like it if it was interesting to you.



Will showed how to combine GraphQL, Neo4j, and our Cypher to build an end to end graph application.

Data Lineage, Rules Engines, Debian Package Analysis


Learning Neo4j


Earnest Chestnut Jr has written an excellent An Introduction to Graph Databases with Neo4j on the Sharp Notions blog.

Hall of Fame player’s Batting and Fielding statistics

Hall of Fame player’s Batting and Fielding statistics

Using a baseball dataset, Ernest shows how to build Cypher queries from scratch to the point where we can answer questions such as “Who were this Hall of Fame player’s teammates?” or “What teams did this Hall of Fame player play for?”. And all of this is done inside the Neo4j sandbox!

If you want to get started with Neo4j you can be up and running with your own sandbox instance in just a few minutes.

In a similar vein, Laura Kahn has written about her experiences learning Neo4j over the summer.

The Omics Database Generator


A couple of weeks ago Joseph Guhlin released the Omics Database Generator (ODG) – a tool for generating, querying, and analyzing multi-omics comparative databases to facilitate biological understanding. ODG uses Neo4j’s graph database as the backend.

This week Joseph wrote an article showing how to Use ODG from the Neo4j Web Console. He provides step by step instructions to get up and running and then writes queries to explore gene ontologies and find specific genes.

Next Week


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

Tweet of the Week


My favourite tweet this week was by Dom Weldon:

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

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

Cheers, Mark