Category Archives: Problems

Flight Search with the Neo4j Traversal API

Screen Shot 2015-08-30 at 2.21.07 AM

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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Modeling Airline Flights in Neo4j

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale in the Steven Spielberg movie "Catch Me If You Can"

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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Importing the Hacker News Interest Graph

HackerNews-799e9e47

Graphs are everywhere. Think about the computer networks that allow you to read this sentence, the road or train networks that get you to work, the social network that surrounds you and the interest graph that holds your attention. Everywhere you look, graphs. If you manage to look somewhere and you don’t see a graph, then you may be looking at an opportunity to build one. Today we are going to do just that. We are going to make use of the new Neo4j Import tool to build a graph of the things that interest Hacker News.
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Triggers in Neo4j

al-capones-gun

One of the often overlooked features in Neo4j is the “TransactionEventHandler” capabilities… better known in the database world as “Triggers“. When a transaction occurs, we can analyze that event and decide to take some action. To accomplish this, we’ll write a “Kernel Extension” ( a little different from the Unmanaged Extensions we’ve seen on this blog ) to tie in our trigger.

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One Direction Relationships in Neo4j

onedirectionchop

In the Neo4j Property Graph model, every single Relationship must be Typed and Directed. This means they must have a specific name (FRIENDS, LIKES, FOLLOWS, etc) and have a Start Node and an End Node to show direction. What’s neat is that when you write your queries you can choose to ignore that. The following queries are all valid:

// Get all the people I follow 
MATCH (u1:Person)-[:FOLLOWS]->(u2:Person)
WHERE u1.username = "maxdemarzi"
RETURN u2.username

// Get all the people that I follow or follow me
MATCH (u1:Person)-[:FOLLOWS]-(u2:Person)
WHERE u1.username = "maxdemarzi"
RETURN u2.username

// Get all the people related to me 
MATCH (u1:Person)--(u2:Person)
WHERE u1.username = "maxdemarzi"
RETURN u2.username

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Caching Immutable Id lookups in Neo4j

GiveMeTheCache

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you probably know I like using YourKit and Gatling for testing end to end requests in Neo4j. Today however we are going to do something a little different. We are going to be micro-benchmarking a very small piece of code within our Unmanaged Extension using a Java library called JMH.

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Remote Profiling Neo4j with YourKit on AWS

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A few months ago, Mark Needham blogged about how to setup remote monitoring of Neo4j using YourKit. I was asked the other day about getting a few more details on how to do this on Amazon, so here is my attempt at that. The first thing we’ll do is setup Neo4j on a Virtual Private Cloud. It’s good practice to not put your databases directly on the public internet.
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Tracking User Paths in an IVR with Neo4j

I started my software development career writing applications for a Call Center at a small bank in Florida. I remember the bank had purchased whatever the “Cadillac” of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems was then for some crazy amount of money. Today you can build an IVR overnight using Twilio.

twilio

When you sign up with Twilio, you get to choose your phone number (more or less). For example, I picked +1 (636) 451-7411, which spells out +1 (neo) 4j1-7411. If you were to call this number right now (assuming I have not run out of Twilio credits) you’ll connect to my IVR.
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Scaling Concurrent Writes in Neo4j

concurrent writes

A while ago, I showed you a way to scale Neo4j writes using RabbitMQ. Which was kinda cool, but some of you asked me for a different solution that didn’t involve adding yet another software component to the stack.

Turns out we can do this in just Neo4j using a little help from the Guava library. The solution involved a background service running that holds the writes in a queue, and every once in a while (like say every second) commits those writes in one transaction.
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Translating Cypher To Neo4j Java API 2.0

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About 6 months ago we looked at how to translate a few lines of Cypher in to way too much Java code in version 1.9.x. Since then Cypher has changed and I suck a little less at Java, so I wanted to share a few different ways to translate one into the other just in case you stuck in a mid-eighties time warp and are paid by the number of lines of code you write per hour.

But first, lemme take a #Selfie let’s make some data. Michael Hunger has a series of blog posts on getting and creating data in Neo4j, we’ll steal borrow his ideas. Let’s create 100k nodes:

WITH ["Jennifer","Michelle","Tanya","Julie","Christie","Sophie","Amanda","Khloe","Sarah","Kaylee"] AS names 
FOREACH (r IN range(0,100000) | CREATE (:User {username:names[r % size(names)]+r}))

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