Actor Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale in the Steven Spielberg movie “Catch Me If You Can”
If you’ve come to any of the Neo4j Data Modeling classes I’ve taught, you’ve must have heard me say “your model depends on both your data and your queries” about a million times. Let us take a closer dive into what this means by looking at how one might model airline flight data in Neo4j.
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I think I am going to take the opportunity to explain why I love graphs in this blog post. I’m going to try to explain why looking at problems from the graph point of view opens you up to creative solutions and makes back-end development fun again. The context of our post is flight search, but our true mission is to figure out how to traverse a graph quickly and efficiently so we can apply our knowledge to other problems.
A long while back, I showed you different ways to model airline flight data. When it comes to modeling in graphs, the lesson to take away is that there is no right way. The optimal model is heavily dependent on the queries you want to ask. Just to prove the point, I’m going to show you yet another way to model the airline flight data that is truly optimized for flight search. If you recall, our last model looked like:
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One of the aspects of my job that I love is the week long proof of concept bootcamps. What it entail is me (or one of my team members) coming onsite to work with your team to build out a POC in just one week. They all vary some what, but I try to stick to a formula that works for me. I spend the first day with the whole team ironing out the Model. This is the trickiest part to get right, because if the model is right, the queries will fall right into place. If the model has to be changed significantly on day 3 let’s say, then a ton of work has to be redone or at least greatly modified. The goal of the end of day one is to have something that looks like the following:
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If you have never watched Firefly, then stop whatever you are doing and get to it, you can come back and read this post later. Ok good, now where were we. Firefly. The series is set a few hundred years from now, after people begin to terraform a new star system and it follows the adventures of the renegade crew of Serenity, a “Firefly-class” spaceship whose work consists of cargo runs or smuggling while failing to stay out of trouble. There is no faster than light travel in this series, so ships can’t just “warp” where ever they want. Instead they travel about from planets and moons, exchanging cargo, refueling and trying to make a living. We are going to model “The Verse” of Firefly in Neo4j, and see how we can find routes to move our illicit cargo from one place to another.
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Before Cypher came along, if you wanted to describe a graph traversal in Neo4j you would use the Traversal Framework Java API. The Traversal API is one of the many hidden gems of Neo4j and today we are going to take a closer look at it. Traversing a graph is about going on a journey. All journeys have a starting point (or points) so that’s the first thing we have to do, figure out where in the graph we begin. It can be a single node, or multiple ones, but they will go on the journey following the same rules, so its easier if it’s just one node or nodes of the same “type”.
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Max De Marzi 