This week in Neo4j - 1 July 2017 - Graph Database & Analytics

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 weeks edition is not brought to you by Mark, because he’s busy taking care of his extremely cute, newborn daughter. Congratulations and all the best to your wife and yourself Mark, we’re very excited.

Featured Community Member: Mark Needham

That’s why I wanted to use the opportunity to feature Mark himself as this weeks community member.

He started as a support engineer at Neo4j helping customers, then became a developer in our clustering team in London building the new Causal Cluster infrastructure and now brings all his enthusiasm into our very own developer relations team.

Mark Needham – This Week’s Featured Community Member

Ever since he joined Neo4j he wrote countless articles, grew the London meetup almost singlehandledly to 3870+ members, organized many hackathons, took care of the Neo4j training classes and started the Online Meetup. And for more than 4 months now he compiles all the goodness of our community into

On behalf of everyone at Neo4j and in the community, thanks for all your work Mark!

This week we could welcome the 5000th member (Eddie Fuller) to our neo4j-users Discord the place to be when you have questions or answers around Neo4j and related projects.

GraphConnect Highlights

Now that it’s been a bit more than a month that Neo4j 3.2 was launched at GraphConnect Europe in London and all the videos and slides of the talks are available, we want to highlight a few that we liked a lot.

If you have experiences with Neo4j to share with a broader audience, please submit your talk for GraphConnect New York on Oct 24-24. The Call-for-Papers runs until July 16.

Releases

This week we’ve seen a number of releases from the Neo4j team.

The third alpha release of Neo4j 3.3 has been published, you the changelog highlights import performance improvements and a lot of Cypher bug fixes
The Neo4j 3.0.10 maintenance release was published too, if you’re still on the 3.0.10 branch please update.
The drivers team published a flurry of release for the 1.4.x line supporting byte arrays and multiple bookmarks. Nigel also hosted the first of a series of regular driver contributor hangouts this Friday.
I’m happy to announce that the first preview release of the neo4j graph algorithms library made it into the wild. We would love to get your feedback on this effort, which we are going to continue to evolve with our partners from Avantgarde Labs (and their developers Martin and Paul).
Our friends from GraphAware released the Neo4j 3.2.x compatible version of their popular GraphAware Framework
Neo4j Partner Graphilieon published the zero-install Sandbox version of their InterActor tool, a very powerful Visualizer and graph based application builder.

Blogs & Publications

Chris Fauerbach published his Learning Neo4j Graphs and Cypher video series with Packt Publishing
My friend Dirk Mahler released the version 1.3.0 of the software analytics toolkit jQAssistant, which now supports standalone Neo4j servers and works with Neo4j 3.x.
If you want to try it out, I started working on a Neo4j Browser Guide for jQAssistant :play https://guides.neo4j.com/jqa and gathered some useful resources in https://github.com/jexp/awesome-jqassistant.
Markus Harrer published the (german) slides for his presentation on aligning code and architecture (with jQAssistant) at the JUG Nürnberg.
Our most prolific blogger Tomaz Bratanic made the first 3 parts of his Game of Thrones series available, discussing the steps to import the raw CSV data into a proper graph model: part 1, part 2, part 3
Arne Wossning from daten-and-bass published detailed instructions how to configure the existing Travis-CI Neo4j service with a custom database, credentials, certificates and permissions
Tobias Trelle published a (german) article on how to style nodes and relationships in the Neo4j browser using the textual grass stylesheet.

Online Meetup: OGMNeo a JavaScript Object Graph Mapper for Neo4j

In this week’s online meetup Luciano Almeida, presented his JavaScript object graph mapper for Neo4j that aims to make building JavaScript applications easier. Besides CRUD functionality, it also provides a Cypher-DSL, DTO and DAO support.

He also demonstrated an example application that used the OGM to drive a REST (Swagger) and GraphQL API.

You can find the repository here: https://github.com/LucianoPAlmeida/OGMNeo and the demo here: https://github.com/LucianoPAlmeida/ogmneo-demo.

If you wrote an Object Graph Mapper for Neo4j please reach out to us, we plan another event with a few different OGMs for different languages or approaches and perhaps a discussion between the authors.

Our upcoming Online meetups are also not to miss:

July 6, Greg Walker: learnmeabitcoin.com: Using Neo4j to import and analyze the bitcoin blockchain
July 13, Don Kondratyuk: Graph NLU: Natural Language Understanding with Python and Neo4j
July 19, Nigel Small: An introduction to Neo4j Bolt Drivers
July 27, Niek Bartholomeus: OpenTheBox – a full view of Corporate Networks in Belgium

On GitHub: Tutorials, Visualizers, Testing, Security

Michael Moore made a very cool Advanced Neo4j Practicum available, which is based on the Marvel Universe. It teaches how to use different tools to load data, design a schema and deploy a full stack reporting application.
Marco Falcier demonstrates in this project how to write Neo4j User Defined Procedures in our new favorite language Kotlin
From last weeks Neo4j life sciences event in Berlin,, Simon Jupp published the content for workshop: Importing lifescience data into Neo4j as a Neo4j browser guide
The assertj-neo4j project was already started several years ago, but got updated this week to work with Neo4j 3.x
Joanna Bitton published a react component for visualizing Neo4j graphs, this comes in very handy
Nigel Small created a Bolt Proxy server which could be useful as a test server or for logging and debugging when building Bolt powered graph applications.
Stefano Cordio created csb – a Big Data Benchmarking Suite for Cyber-Security Analytics based on property graphs.

Meetup Recording

Chris Willemsen from Graphaware presented his “Chatbot and Conversational Experiences with Amazon Alexa, Neo4j and GraphAware NLP” talk at the Prague Graph Meetup two weeks ago.

Last week, the video recording was published:

From The Knowledge Base

This week from the Neo4j Knowledge Base we have 3 posts:

Performing match intersection Andrew Bowman discusses approaches to find nodes that are related to a set of input nodes
Redirect Neo4j logs to sysout Jose Rosa describes how to use rsyslog to achieve a unified Neo4j logging under Linux
Sometimes you quickly need to check port availability and connectivity. In A light weight approach to validating network port connectivity Dana Canzano describes some ways of doing that.

Next Week

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

It seems summer and holiday season has finally started and there are not too many events. So get out, enjoy the sun and have fun with your friends and family.

Our next week’s Online Meetup will feature Greg Walker who demonstrates how he solved importing and querying the Bitcoin blockchain in Neo4j. The import code is available in Greg’s bitcoin-to-neo4j library if you want to take a sneak peek before the session.

Tweet of the Week

Will Lyon observed at the IRE17 journalism conference, how journalists from the Washington Post and the ICIJ explained their use of Neo4j in investigative journalism.

. @jackgillum from @washingtonpost and Emilia Diaz-Struck from @icijorg showing how to use @neo4j to analyze federal contract data #IRE17 pic.twitter.com/Vmq4uQL3CR
— William Lyon (@lyonwj) June 23, 2017