A recent visit by [digital:meditation] to a Neo4j meetup tutorial


I’ve been for quite a while into what they use to call “NoSQL databases” these days, even while we still heavily rely upon infrastructure which is anything else than NoSQL – not a bad thing, overally, I guess half the software developing world still does. Yet, I’ve always been interested in approaches offered by “non-relational” database systems, and be that for the (obvious) idea that maybe there’s problems that aren’t easily or effectively solvable using relational database systems. neo4j is one of the more interesting pieces of technology on that list, and so attending the neo4j tutorial and meet-up held at buschmais in late June, 2013, was quite a pleasant experience… Effectively, the day consisted of two different parts, first one being a longer tutorial by Michael Hunger, which worked out rather well. Being an introductory course served to an audience not familiar with the technology, the course was prepared, structured, presented rather good. Following the instructions was pretty straightforward, the examples as well as the lab sessions were both insightful and fun, and, in the end, I spent the evening hacking an embedded neo4j instance into an experimental piece of code we are working on in our current research project (which happens to deal with graph data structures, even though down the OWL/RDF road) and had fun playing with the code, the API and the infrastructure. This tutorials focus wasn’t on how to use neo4j from Java, which at some point would have been nice but in the end prove unnecessary as the neo4j Java API is pretty straightforward and playing with the Cypher query language and the things possible in terms of data modeling and querying, from a development point of view, seems by far more interesting anyway. 😉 Overally, so, it was quite an inspiring tutorial, leaving one behind with a load of inspirations and ideas what to do with the things just learnt and tried. Which, possibly, is a good thing. Just logically, the second (evening) part of that day, considered an experimental first “Dresden neo4j Meetup”, was all about, after a short briefing on future neo4j development directions, having two good lectures (by Michael and Buschmais’ Dirk Mahler) who (obviously quite successfully) used and are using neo4j for evaluating and assessing software architecture quality, as can be seen in jqassistant which was presented during that meetup. Though this, overally, is not quite the use case I personally am having in mind for neo4j, it still is a really interesting way of using this technology, not even talking about jqassistant itself being pretty helpful when trying to check and enforce various architectural constraints in larger maven-built projects. Moved to the ever-growing pile of things to play with. 🙂 Read the Full Article Here.  

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