May 2014 Summaries

Neo4j 2.1 has been released, bringing improvements to the user experience and under-the-hood enhancements, including easy import with ETL features directly in Cypher, optimized for graphs of millions of scale. The new LOAD CSV clause allows users to easily extract data from legacy databases and bring it into Neo4j to experience its true graph form. Additionally, Neo4j 2.1 introduces dense nodes support, which provides a transparent performance boost when accessing relatively fewer relationships amongst the general mass of relationships in social graphs. New Cypher functionality includes the UNWIND function and an experimental query planner that improves performance for some queries. Other notable improvements include a new lock manager in Neo4j Enterprise Edition and official support for OpenJDK 7.

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a future where everyday physical objects are connected to the internet and can identify themselves to other devices, allowing them to share information with one another and with humans. The concept has been around since 1991, but the term was coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton. This shift toward IoT has led to significant disruption in how brands, enterprises, and businesses communicate with their stakeholders, resulting in new datasets that demand open, flexible, and connected data models. Graph databases, such as Neo4j, are well-suited to manage this complex information system, allowing for the modeling of entities and relationships between them, which is essential for creating personalized experiences across devices and objects. The use of graphs enables easy querying of data, generating useful information for applications, as demonstrated by a wearable device demo illustrating the connections between wearables, devices, and locations.