Social applications and Graph Databases go together like peanut butter and jelly. I’m going to walk you through the steps of building an application that connects to Facebook, pulls your friends and likes data and visualizes it. I plan on making a video of me coding it one line at a time, but for now let’s just focus on the main elements.
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When embarking on a new Neo4j project, one of the things you have to figure out is where to run it. Most of the time the answer is just your laptop. Other times, using Heroku works great. However, if you are at the stage of your testing where you have billions of nodes and relationships, you need something a little bigger.
If you are not ready to commit to purchasing a 100k server for testing, then I suggest you borrow one for a short time. You can try to spin up an Amazon EC2 instance, the high memory large ones go up to 60 gigs of RAM. But what if you need more? Lots more?
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It is interesting to see how node, relationship and property records are stored differently on disk and in the cache.
It is all linked lists of fixed size records on disk. Properties are stored as a linked list of property records, each holding a key and value and pointing to the next property. Each node and relationship references its first property record. The Nodes also reference the first relationship in its relationship chain. Each Relationship references its start and end node. It also references the previous and next relationship record for the start and end node respectively.
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How does the saying go? Opinions are like bellybuttons, everybody’s got one? So let’s say you have an opinion that NOSQL is not for you. Maybe you read my blog and think this Graph Database stuff is great for recommendation engines and path finding and maybe some other stuff, but you got really hard problems and it can’t help you.
I am going to try to show you that a graph database can help you solve your really hard problems if you can frame your problem in terms of a graph. Did I say “you”? I meant anybody, specially Ph.D. students. One trick is to search for “graph based approach to” and your problem.
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Max De Marzi 