September 2017 Summaries

This week in Neo4j highlights the contributions of community members and developers who are building applications with graph databases. Featured community member Sylvain Roussy, Director of R&D at Blueway Software, was recognized for his work on a new book demonstrating developing an application from idea to production. GraphAware's Christophe Willemsen shared knowledge on how to combine Amazon Alexa and Neo4j to build conversational experiences in an online meetup. Developers like Markus Harrer, Michael Hunger, and Adam Hopkins showcased their expertise in using jQAssistant, GraphQL, and Neo4j for software analytics, building higher-level abstractions of source code, and more. Additionally, the Data Science Milan group hosted an event focusing on data science applications made possible by graph databases, while Tomaz Bratanic was interviewed on the podcast about his move to coding fulltime and his love for Cypher. Upcoming events include talks on finding connections between components from 100s of Gigabytes of product data and more.

Life science researchers have been adopting graph databases, such as Neo4j, instead of traditional relational or triple stores. A recent workshop in Berlin brought together researchers and practitioners to share their experiences with graph technology. The presentations covered various applications, including genome-, proteome-, pathway- and systems-biology model databases and interactions, drug development efforts, and plans for improving healthcare. Researchers discussed the benefits of using graph databases for managing systems biology models, comparing multiple metaproteomics samples, and exploring protein association databases. They also highlighted challenges in performing graph-similarity measures on XML-encoded simulation models. The workshop demonstrated how to query public linked data endpoints and integrate results into a Neo4j property graph. Graph databases are being used to normalize protein structures, improve healthcare outcomes, and support medical decision-making systems. Researchers emphasized the need for user-driven methods for graph exploration, intuitive graph explanation, and interactivity in graph exploration. The workshop also covered data modeling for systems medicine with Neo4j and integrating linked life science data sources into a graph model in Neo4j.

This week in Neo4j highlights the community's achievements and notable events. Alessandro Negro, Chief Scientist at GraphAware, is featured as a community member for his work on Reco4j and machine learning/graphs. He will present on Powering Relevant Search with Neo4j and Elastic Search at GraphConnect New York. The community also discussed RDF-vs-Property Graph Alternative Facts, presented by Dr. Jesús Barrasa, which compares and contrasts the Labelled Property Graph (LPG) and RDF approaches to modelling graphs. Additionally, there were announcements about new plugins for Pentaho Kettle, a tool that exports Maven dependency graphs into Neo4j, and an interview with IBM's Chuck Calio on running Neo4j on IBM Power8 hardware. The community is also preparing for upcoming events, including GraphConnect New York, which will take place on October 24th, 2017.

A growing category of graph databases has led to some technical folks attempting to educate engineers on artificial distinctions, with non-native vendors testing their support for graphs in non-native graph databases. However, these attempts fail to meet the definition of a native graph database, which is designed for graph workloads at every level and consistently processes graphs without excess components. Two common approaches, the graph layer and graph operator, violate this definition by requiring multiple components, inconsistent query languages, and unpredictable performance. In contrast, Neo4j achieves native graph database status through its careful design, optimized algorithms, and consistent processing of graph data.

This week in Neo4j highlights the latest community achievements and developments in the world of graph databases. Bruno Peres, a frequent answerer on StackOverflow, is featured as this week's community member, showcasing his expertise on Cypher queries. The online meetup by Jonathan Freeman focused on analyzing the Kaggle Instacart dataset using Cypher. Additionally, updates were announced for Cypher linter, Cypher on Flink, and an object-oriented interface for managing Cypher queries in Python. A poem about graph databases was also shared, as well as solutions to StackOverflow questions on MERGE confusion, subqueries, and shortest path searches with predicate checks. The knowledge base featured a query to kill transactions that take longer than X seconds and don’t contain certain keywords. Meanwhile, new projects were launched, including a Telegram bot for recipe recommendations and an application for feature toggles in graphs. Upcoming events include a full-stack graph application build and data science in life sciences with GraphQL and Neo4j. The week ended with a tweet of the week from Urmas Heinaste about the Neo4j Sandbox.

Neo4j has been actively engaging with its community by featuring notable members, hosting online meetups, and releasing new tools. Regina Imhoff was highlighted as a featured community member for her presentation on combining Elixir Phoenix with Neo4j to create a social networking site. The community also showcased how to use the new Neo4j graph algorithms package, which was released in August, to analyze various datasets such as the London tube system and Facebook ego network. Additionally, Vindya Hettige provided an in-depth tutorial on working with Neo4j Graph Databases, while Ben Zvan presented a talk on WTF is a graph database? at the DevOps Minneapolis meetup. The community also explored ways to discover awesome female engineers in the GraphQL community using gender-api.com and created tools for analyzing CityGML datasets and Java type dependencies. Furthermore, Kevin Madden from Tom Sawyer Software discussed his experiences with graph visualization in high-end engineering on the Neo4j podcast. Upcoming events include a discussion on RDF vs Graph Properties and Efficient Graph Algorithms in Neo4j, as well as talks by William Lyon Philip Rathle Yogish Pai. The community also celebrated the datetime features added to the apoc plugin team.

The Neo4j community has been active with various news and updates in the last week. Felienne Hermans, an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology, was featured as a community member, known for her popular talk on spreadsheets being graphs. She recently achieved tenure and uses Neo4j to analyze spreadsheets for code smells and areas that need refactoring. The community has also shared various projects and meetups, including Graph of Thrones, Salesforce integration with Neo4j, fraud analysis, work order management, Kotlin procedures, and graphing causal events. Upcoming events include JUG Switzerland and a meetup on September 5th-7th focusing on GDPR, data centre moves, and football transfers. The community has also shared tweets from Iryna Feuerstein about her newcomer talk on graph databases being accepted.