Twin4j

This Week in Neo4j – 3 June 2017

Developer Relations Engineer

June 3, 2017

4 min read

Welcome to this week in Neo4j where we round up what’s been happening in the world of graph databases in the last 7 days.

Featured Community Member: Niklas Saers

This week’s featured community member is opens in new tabNiklas Saers, iOS Lead at Unwire and the co-maintainer of opens in new tabTheo – the Neo4j Swift driver with Cory Wiles.

Niklas Saers – This week’s featured community member

Niklas first came across Neo4j in a workshop hosted by Dr Jim Webber and Ian Robinson back in 2011 and had used it for several prototypes before getting involved with the port of Theo to opens in new tabSwift 3.0 in December 2016.

At that point Theo still used Neo4j’s HTTP API so Niklas got to work porting it to use the Bolt protocol.
In the process he built opens in new tabBolt-swift, as well as opens in new tabPackstream-Swift.

Next up for Niklas is integrating Theo with opens in new tabFluent, an ORM for the Server Side Swift framework Vapor.

On behalf of the Neo4j and Swift communities, thanks for all your hard work Niklas!

WikiMap: Analysing Wikipedia in Neo4j

opens in new tabRaj Shrimali has written a series of articles around importing Wikipedia into Neo4j.

opens in new tabGenesis in which Raj explains the import process and loads in a subset of the full dataset.
opens in new tabPivot in which Raj experiments with using different number of threads to import the data.
opens in new tabOptimization where the attempts to speed up the import process continue.
opens in new tabProcessing where Raj runs a mini retrospective on the import process so far.

The code for Raj’s project is available in the opens in new tabwiki-analysis repository on GitHub.

Neo4j <3 Preact

The opens in new tabrelease of Neo4j 3.2 at GraphConnect Europe 2017 saw the release of a brand new version of the Neo4j browser.

? We’re (@neo4j) now a proud sponsor of @preactjs. You should support them too! https://t.co/Bpf4DBFUJu #opencollective

— Oskar Hane (@oskarhane) May 30, 2017

The browser was completely rewritten using opens in new tabPreact, the fast 3kB alternative to the popular opens in new tabReact library, and Neo4j are now a proud sponsor of the project.

On behalf of all users of the Neo4j browser, thank you Preact!

Getting started with Neo4j

This was a week where several people wrote about their experiences getting started with graph databases.

opens in new tabJames Hughes has just finished applying for the PMP exam and created the Project Management Body of Knowledge graph. James then analyzes the dataset using a series of Cypher queries.
opens in new tabDiane Kierce is just getting into graph databases and has opens in new tabwritten about her experience so far.
Paweł Głowacki has been going through the opens in new tabGraph Databases book and opens in new tabwrote a brief article containing his thoughts so far.

Friday is release day

This week saw the release of 4 different versions of Neo4j.

opens in new tab3.3.0-alpha01 – the first milestone release in the 3.3 series contains support for multiple bookmarks in the Bolt server, bug fixes for the Neo4j browser, and support for USING INDEX for OR expressions in Cypher.
opens in new tab3.2.1 contains support for multiple bookmarks in the Bolt server, bug fixes for the Neo4j browser, as well as a few Hazelcast related usability improvements.
opens in new tab3.1.5 contains some procedure bug fixes and improved batching in the import tool.
opens in new tab2.3.11 saw a few minor bug fixes.

If you give any of these releases a try let us know how you get on by sending an email to devrel@neo4j.com

Python for IoT, PHP crawler, relational db analysis

opens in new tabCarl Turechek created opens in new tabReckless-Recluse – a powerful PHP crawler designed to dig up site problems.
opens in new tabNigel Small created n4 – a Cypher console for Neo4j. n4 aims to consolidate the old opens in new tabpy2neo command line tooling in a new console application which takes inspiration from opens in new tabNicole White‘s opens in new tabcycli tool.
Matt Lewis created opens in new tabthingernet-graph – a Python script that creates a Neo4j graph showing how a set of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are connected.
opens in new tabRubin Simons created opens in new tabsilver – a tool for loading relational/dependency information from relational database systems into Neo4j for analysis and visualization. At the moment it works with Oracle and next up are PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DB2.

From The Knowledge Base

This week from the opens in new tabNeo4j Knowledge Base we have an article showing how to opens in new tabreset query cardinality in Cypher queries to address the ‘too much WIP’ issue that you can sometimes run into.

On the Podcast: Steven Baker

On the Graphistania podcast this week opens in new tabwe have an interview with opens in new tabSteven Baker, Neo4j Drivers Engineer and the creator of the Ruby behavior-driven development (BDD) framework opens in new tabRSpec.

opens in new tabRik and Steven talk about the history of BDD, Steven’s work building out drivers test infrastructure, living in Sweden, and more.

If you enjoy the podcast don’t forget to add the RSS feed to your podcast software or opens in new tabadd it on iTunes.

Next Week

What’s happening next week in the world of graph databases?

On Tuesday June 6th, 2017, we are hosting opens in new tabNeo4j GraphDay Amsterdam – a full day event featuring a morning of talks about Neo4j use cases before an afternoon training session.
Also on Tuesday June 6th, 2017, opens in new tabRyan Boyd and opens in new tabDaniel Himmelstein will be opens in new tabtalking graphs at the opens in new tabDataPhilly meetup in Philadelphia. Ryan will present on the Panama Papers and Daniel will talk about opens in new tabProject Rephetio.
On Thursday June 8th, 2017, Gabor Szarnyas will be opens in new tabpresenting his GraphConnect presentation “Ingraph: Live Queries on Graphs” at the opens in new tabNeo4j Budapest meetup.
Also on Thursday June 8th, 2017, we are hosting opens in new tabNeo4j GraphTalks London, a half day event focusing on how graph technology can address key challenges relating to Data Quality, Governance and Metadata Management.

Tweet of the Week

My favourite tweet this week was by opens in new tabJamie Gaskins:

Since discovering @neo4j, debugging SQL queries with >1 join feels archaic, like I should also be faxing this query to the DB.

— Jamie Gaskins (@jamie_gaskins) June 1, 2017