This Week in Neo4j – Hackathon, SQL Server to Neo4j, Hexology Startup, Recap GGCD 2021

This week’s featured community member is Craig Taverner.

Craig Taverner is a legendary master in the Neo4j community. He has been building libraries and capabilities for Neo4j since before he became an employee. Craig has been and continues to be an expert and innovator on spatial capabilities with graphs.

His initial contributions were for Amanzitel, where he was CTO. He built multi-property indexes to do cellular network data management and signal quality statistics at Amanzitel, which later led Craig to join Neo4j and build the Neo4j Spatial library – one of the first extensions to the Neo4j database – in 2010. The library has been extremely successful and some of the features have been included into the core product. However, there are still many features in the library that Craig continues to build and innovate as a valuable extension to Neo4j.

Outside of code contributions, Craig has participated in several hackathons and spoken at many events, including last year’s NODES 2020 on building spatial search algorithms for Neo4j. We can also find Craig on the community answering questions in the geospatial topic. Thank you, Craig, for your foundational work and continued contributions in the community!

Connect with Craig on LinkedIn

Tara published a Neo4j blog post with all the details for the newly-announced Leonard Euler Idea Contest! This hackathon was announced at the end of the Global Graph Celebration Day event with a prize pool of up to $10,000 USD. In return, Neo4j wants your ideas and examples using the Neo4j database and beta-release Neo4j GraphQL library. No experience with Neo4j or GraphQL is required.

The blog post outlines the timeline for the hackathon, plus gives criteria for submitted projects. There are also some resources Neo4j makes available to get you started, including access to Neo4j AuraDB Free tier (Neo4j’s database-as-a-service) for the first 100 registrants. So, you don’t want to miss out! 🙂 Registration is already open, so join the enthusiasm and learn and build with Neo4j and GraphQL by registering for the hackathon!

Read the Blog Post

Hadi wrote an article demonstrating how to export indexes and constraints from SQL Server graph tables to Neo4j. There is also a previous article for exporting the data in the tables themselves to Neo4j.

We see how to migrate 3 types of indexes (single property, composite property, full-text) and 4 types of constraints (unique node, node property existence, relationship property existence, node key) from SQL Server graph tables to Neo4j. A Github repository with all the code, plus code snippets in the blog post, show us exactly how this is done.

Read the Blog Post

Darrel wrote a blog post about how Hexology uses Neo4j to power their mobile application and AI through the Neo4j Startup Program. First, we see how graphs provide needed capabilities for data management, especially with regards to AI, responsive applications, and startups. Next, we get an exciting look into what Hexology is building with Neo4j and how it’s used. The blog post wraps up with how Neo4j and the Startup Program, in particular, is helping give them a competitive advantage in the market.

We are so thrilled to hear Hexology’s story and glad that Neo4j can help others be successful in their endeavors!

Read the Blog Post

Missed Global Graph Celebration Day? Will published a blog post and the live stream video highlighting what happened during the Neo4j-hosted meetup!

Starting out, we saw how the foundations of graph theory were developed and got some resources for getting started and involved with the graph community, as well as a fun quiz (due by April 30). Next, we heard from visionaries doing amazing things with connected data. From medical research to data analysis insights to creating powerful models of the physical world, these individuals are at the forefront of graph innovation and inspiration!

The event concluded with a GraphQL Community Update call, where Neo4j engineers showed the new Neo4j GraphQL library. Neo4j then announced the Leonard Euler Idea Contest – a hackathon using Neo4j and GraphQL open to everyone!

Read the Blog Post or Watch the Video

My favorite tweet this week was by Elie k. arno:

Don’t forget to RT if you liked it too!