July 2017 Summaries

GraphConnect, a community-driven platform, aims to connect its extensive community of graph database developers, architects, and CTOs, while enabling them to grow alongside the platform. The event, GraphConnect New York, is the largest-ever gathering of graph database professionals under one roof at Pier 36 in Manhattan. It features various activities, including training sessions, workshops, an executive summit, a hackathon, incredible speaker tracks, lightning talks, and social events like the GraphParty and GraphClinic. The event also offers opportunities for networking, learning, and growth, making it a premier graph technology conference in the United States.

The Neo4j community has been active with various achievements and updates. Dave Bennett is this week's featured community member, recognized for his contributions to the Neo4j community, including presenting at meetups and helping others understand query optimization techniques. Security engineering tools such as Timesketch and BloodHound have gained attention, particularly in their integration with Neo4j graph databases. The APOC Procedures Library has released its Summer 2017 update, introducing features like fuzzy matching and atomic operations. Upcoming events include a Neo4j Bolt Drivers Roundtable and presentations at GraphDB meetups across the US. The community is also exploring knowledge graphs, GoT NLP analysis, and visualizing Workflowy databases in Neo4j.

The Neo4j Sandbox has undergone several updates, including the launch of additional guides and datasets, improvements to its infrastructure for better scale, reliability, and performance, as well as new features such as syntax highlighting and auto-completion in the Neo4j Browser. The Sandbox now allows users to share their accounts with colleagues and friends through a simple click-and-share process. Additionally, a new feature called the Spreadsheets Grapher has been added, which enables users to load data from Google Spreadsheets into Neo4j. The APOC library of procedures and functions has also been upgraded to version 3.2.0.4, offering new features and bug fixes for users.

We are changing our company name to Neo4j, Inc. to reflect the reality that this is how the world has always known us, and we're updating our legal name to better focus our efforts on the successful open source graph database project, Neo4j, which is now a central part of the graph technology movement, with no changes expected for users who already know and use Neo4j. The change will primarily be reflected in fine print and website updates, but it does not affect how users interact with Neo4j. The name "Neo4j" has become globally recognized despite its unconventional sound, and it's here to stay.

The APOC team has released two new versions of the Awesome Procedures On Cypher (APOC) library for Neo4j 3.1 and 3.2, bringing almost 50 new features and fixes to the library after its Spring release. The updates include improvements in load-jdbc, merge procedures, hashing functions, map update tree, and atomic operations on properties of nodes and relationships. APOC now supports exporting to separate files or exporting only the constraints, as well as providing more detailed output of schema indexes and constraints. New features also enable graph grouping, fuzzy matching, and Levenshtein distance for strings, allowing users to take an existing graph and group it into a virtual graph by node labels and properties. The team has also fixed several bugs and improved error messages for missing database drivers. APOC can be installed from the official website and provides more details on new procedures and functions in the documentation or via the `call apoc.help('keyword')` command.

The use of graph technology, specifically Neo4j, is crucial for managing complex identity and access management in financial services firms. The centralized entitlements structure can lead to "permissions creep" and increased risk of data breaches, but graph technology provides a solution by tracking and adapting to interconnected relationships. This enables administrators to easily determine who has what permissions, reducing the risk of data breaches and providing real-time insights into entitlement access. A Global 500 financial services company uses Neo4j to manage user identity and access management for its investment banking platform, demonstrating the flexibility and scalability of graph technology in this context. By using Neo4j, IT organizations can create an effective competitive advantage by mapping out authorizations at individual and group levels and tracking them dynamically as users' roles change within the company.

The Neo4j community has been active with several notable events and contributions this week. Leila Haddou, a long-time member of the Neo4j community, was featured as the community member of the week for her work on using graphs and Neo4j for investigative journalism. The Graph of Thrones contest was also launched, where users can share their graph-based Game of Thrones content to win prizes. Ruth Holloway published articles on getting started with Neo4j, including installing and querying the database. Additionally, there were talks on various topics such as genetic programming, building a music database in Neo4j, and introducing Bolt drivers for Neo4j. The community also shared their experiences with using Neo4j on StackOverflow, discussing topics like query profiling, optional relationship creation, and causal clusters. Upcoming events include meetups and presentations by notable speakers, showcasing the diversity of projects and interests within the Neo4j community.

The text discusses the seventh season launch of "Game of Thrones" and how it has inspired various activities, including publishing graphy content that uses Neo4j, graph visualizations, and graph algorithms. The producers have created their own version of events in Westeros, which can be analyzed using graph databases. The post highlights several examples of such analyses, including a network analysis of character co-occurences in the third book by Will Lyon, who used Neo4j to gain insight into the relevance and connections of people. Another example is Tomaz Bratanic's work on analyzing Kaggle data to draw insights around battles, deaths, and allegiances. The post encourages readers to participate in these activities and share their results, with a chance to win prizes, including Game of Thrones merchandise and a T-shirt.

This week in Neo4j highlights the work of community member Jonathan Freeman, who presented on using Neo4j to analyze grocery receipts and has organized the Neo4j Chicago meetup. The online meetup also featured presentations on Graph NLU and natural language understanding, as well as topics such as GraphQL, Cuckoo Filters, and Mulesoft. The week's knowledge base included an article on validating network port connectivity on Neo4j clusters. Upcoming events include a presentation by Nigel Small on introducing Neo4j Bolt Drivers. The week also featured tweets from community members and developers discussing their projects and experiences with Neo4j.

The presentation discusses the importance of a Single Customer View approach to metadata and master data management in modern enterprises. Pitney Bowes Software has developed the Spectrum platform, which is powered by Neo4j graph database technology. The platform provides a 360-degree view of customers, integrating data from various sources, including postal addresses, customer information, sales data, and social media interactions. The evolution of customer information management has led to the development of knowledge graphs, which enable enterprises to understand relationships between customers, products, and organizations. Spectrum's capabilities include data quality, ETL processes, natural language processing, and analytics, making it a unique solution for master data management. The platform is designed to support agile development, scalability, and flexibility, allowing enterprises to drive effective business decisions and strategy.

The text discusses how financial services firms are using graph technology, specifically Neo4j, to manage complex relationships between IT infrastructure, networks, and other data points. This is particularly important in industries with rapidly changing infrastructure, such as finance, where legacy systems can lead to unintended consequences when new applications are deployed. By leveraging Neo4j's ability to model complex relationships as a graph, organizations can better manage change, improve security-related access, and gain insights into their IT architecture. The text highlights the success story of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which has used Neo4j-based Dart to automate deployment and improve developer productivity, resulting in a 50% increase in usage over seven months.

This week in Neo4j`, the graph database community has been active with various releases, including `Neo4j 3.2.2` and updates to the JavaScript bolt driver. The community has also seen contributions from notable figures such as Cristina Escalante, who has worked on improving developer pages and training materials for Neo4j. Blog posts and publications have covered topics like malware analysis using impfuzzy tool and performance hotspots with JProfiler and Neo4j. An online meetup featured a presentation by Greg Walker on modeling blockchains in Neo4j, while new projects include a Python-based Neo4j shell called `n4` and an extension method for generating Cypher patterns called `Neo4jClient-Vector`. Upcoming events will include presentations on natural language understanding with Python and Neo4j. The community has also celebrated milestones, including the birth of Chris' baby, as captured in a tweet from Neo4j.

This week's edition of "This Week in Neo4j" highlights the community's efforts and recent releases from the Neo4j team. Mark Needham is featured as a community member, having made significant contributions to the company, including writing articles, organizing meetups, and helping with training classes. The 5000th member joined the neo4j-users Discord channel, and the GraphConnect Europe conference has concluded, with videos and slides from the talks available online. Recent releases include Neo4j 3.2 and its alpha version, as well as updates to the Bolt drivers for various programming languages. Blogs and publications feature articles on topics such as machine learning, data analytics, and graph visualization. The OGMNeo JavaScript object graph mapper for Neo4j was showcased in an online meetup, and upcoming events include talks on using Neo4j for blockchain analysis and introducing Neo4j Bolt Drivers. Additionally, the Neo4j Knowledge Base has published three new posts on topics such as match intersection, logging, and port connectivity validation.