This Week in Neo4j – Neo4j & Python, Model Git Commits, Slack to Discord, Open Names Data

This week’s featured community member is Andreas Kollegger.

Andreas is Developer Relations Community Representative here at Neo4j, recently taking on quite a bit of the community leadership and efforts. He has been a part of the Neo4j community since the early days of the company (before he was an employee!) and has continued to be involved in giving his all to provide the best experience for Neo4j users.

In the early years, Andreas created a lot of community content, including training materials and online presentations. As one of the first 10 employees at Neo4j, he devoted much of his time to community efforts and presenting at meetups and road-shows. He became Director of Product Management for Developer Tools where he led the strategy and development for Neo4j Desktop and Browser. He also was influential in the early days of Neo4j Bloom. Through his efforts in that area, he introduced the concepts of the Relate framework and graph apps in Neo4j Desktop. Recently, he created Gram, a textual format for graph data. You can find him on many of our community platforms like Discord, the Community Forum, and Medium. Thank you, Andreas, for your dedicated commitment to improving Neo4j and encouraging current and new users!

Connect with Andreas on LinkedIn

Madison writes a helpful post on using Neo4j with Py2neo, which is a Python package that operates similar to a driver for connecting to Neo4j. We get a bit of background and how it works, then dive right in to a walkthrough! First, our environment gets set up with details for both Windows and Mac to prepare a Python virtual environment, start a Neo4j database, and install required packages.

Next, Madison gives us a template code sample that we can substitute into our environment for easy spin-up, which we can tweak later, if needed. She even gives us some ideas for using parameters and lists in Py2neo with a link for the documentation included. Wrapping up, she leaves us with a couple of other helpful articles to continue our learning and hints at a future follow-up from her. We’d love to see more!

Read the blog post

Tom published an excellent article on his process for modeling git commits for the coderadar project. At the start, Tom tested his approach with JPA entities and a relational database. Queries were cumbersome and join tables occupied a large amount of space. He felt there must be a better way.

Enter graphs! Neo4j was the choice, as it would store the relationships of commits and files more simply and also provided good support for Spring Data Neo4j. He was able to get up and running pretty quickly with the skills he needed and walks us through his graph data model and querying the data with Cypher. While he agrees the relational model was feasible, he advocates that the graph model improved and simplified his use case.

Read the blog post

Neo4j announced that we are moving our Slack community to Discord! Our community was growing too big, and we wanted to take advantage of some features available in Discord that weren’t possible in Slack, such as group video calls and screen sharing.

In Discord, we have the ability to pop into different channels (as with Slack) and even have continuous video/audio channels so you can virtually co-work, ask questions, or chat live with others. We have created a couple of specific channels for our NODES 2021 event and a general AMA channel where you can join office hours with Neo4j staff for questions or chat. Join our Discord community to join in the fun!

Read the Blog Post

EarthlingDavey created an early release of opennames-to-neo4j, which is a public API of places, roads, and postal codes in Great Britain. The data can be downloaded as CSV, GML, API, and Geopackage formats for automatically importing into Neo4j.

The Github repository gives a great overview of the architecture, graph data model, system requirements, and installation/usage for the data. We even get some examples and ways to extend functionality. It’s still an early release, but the library is intriguing and useful. EarthlingDavey is using it for a project to convert user location search to latitude and longitude coordinates for the purpose of distance calculations. For any feedback or questions, the author points us to create a Github issue or contact him on the Neo4j Discord community.

Clone the Github Repository

My favorite tweet this week was by FANTASIA4UE:

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