Graphs for Ease and Scalability in the Auto Industry: The 5-Minute Interview with Michal Stefanak

​​”I think graph database is the only database we should use – at all. It’s the best one. After using Neo4j, I don’t want to go back to relational databases. The Neo4j database is perfect. It’s exactly the way people think and how you draw all the UML diagrams and everything. It’s exactly what you do,” says Michal Stefanak, Programmer at VOLKE.


Graph technology has applications across industries, across the globe, and across use cases. We had the pleasure of learning about one customer’s graph story when we spoke to Michal Stefanak, Programmer at VOLKE, at our inaugural GraphSummit series over the summer.

From managing technical rights for employees to his experience adopting graph technology, his enthusiasm for graph is infectious. And that’s what we like to see!

Check out his 5-Minute Interview below.

Please introduce yourself.

Michal Stefanak: My name is Michal Stefanak. I am originally from Slovakia, but I work in Czechia for a company called VOLKE, which works with car production companies like Skoda, Volkswagen, Bugatti. We also did something for BMW, I think.

How do you use Neo4j?

Michal Stefanak: How is my work related to Neo4j? I am the author of the PHP driver to communicate with the Neo4j database over a TCP socket, and it’s called Bolt. I made a few projects with this driver and the Neo4j database.

One project was a system for managing employee rights and requirements. When somebody wants, for example, access to the internet, or wants a second monitor, or wants access to a different office and needs a key card to open the door, with our system you are able to manage all these rights.

It manages the requests from the people asking for these rights and the system asks their superiors to allow the rights, and then the system has some scripts which are able to configure the right by itself, if possible. It’s really cool because there are a lot of relationships between everything.

What do you think is in store for the future of graph technology?

Michal Stefanak:I think graph database is the only database we should use – at all. It’s the best one. After using Neo4j, I don’t want to go back to relational databases. The Neo4j database is perfect. It’s exactly the way people think and how you draw all the UML diagrams and everything. It’s exactly what you do.

You just translate this whiteboard into the database, which is great. You don’t have to think differently. If you want to create a database, you just use what you want. I think it’s already affecting how we do this stuff because the development is way faster with graph database. It’s faster because it’s really scalable.

You create some schema for data and if you want to add something, it’s really easy. It’s not like stubborn relational databases. It’s very simple, very user friendly for the developers and it’s because of this scalability. It’s very friendly to use, very fast. This way, I can see the developers are happy to use the graph database. Myself, I found a new joy from programming with Neo4j.