Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
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Max De Marzi
Graphs, Graphs, and nothing but the Graphs
Category Archives: Random
Neo4j 2.0 is coming
House Neo4j of Graph Databases is one of the Great Houses of NOSQL and the principal noble house of The Graph; many lesser houses are sworn to them. In days of old they ruled as Kings of the Graph; since the Aggregate Store Conquest they have been Wardens of the Path. Their seat, San Mateo, is an ancient castle renowned for its sushi. Their sigil is a octopus racing across a field of white, and their words are “Neo4j 2.0 Is Coming,” one of only a few house mottoes to be a warning rather than a boast. Members of the family tend to be lean of build and long of face, with golden hair and blue eyes.
A Peek behind the Neo4j Lucene Index Curtain
Did you know you can write Javascript in the Neo4j console to access the Neo4j API?
Try it. Open up your Neo4j Web Admin Console and type:
neo4j-sh (0)$ eval db
EmbeddedGraphDatabase [data/graph.db]
OMG! I know, Neo4j is crazy. So much to play with, I’ve been at it for a few years and I haven’t even dug into this area. What else can we do here?
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Neo4j and Gatling sitting in a tree, Performance T-E-S-T-ing
I was introduced to the open-source performance testing tool Gatling a few months ago by Dustin Barnes and fell in love with it. It has an easy to use DSL, and even though I don’t know a lick of Scala, I was able to figure out how to use it. It creates pretty awesome graphics and takes care of a lot of work for you behind the scenes. They have great documentation and a pretty active google group where newbies and questions are welcomed.
It ships with Scala, so all you need to do is create your tests and use a command line to execute it. I’ll show you how to do a few basic things, like test that you have everything working, then we’ll create nodes and relationships, and then query those nodes.
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Hunting Trolls with Neo4j!
Allison Sparrow shared a link to Patentula, a company interested in finding better ways to explore patent data and hunt patent trolls. What caught my attention is this quote from the video below:
What we tried to do with it, is bypass any sort of keyword processing in order to find similar patents. The reason we’ve done this is to avoid the problems encountered by other systems that rely on natural language processing or semantic analysis simply because patents are built to avoid detection by similar keywords…we use network topology (specifically citation network topology) to mine the US patent database in order to predict similar documents.
Networks, Crowds, and Markets
I’ve had “Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World” by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg on my bookshelf for a few months now, and a conversation with a client reminded me that I hadn’t finished reading it (barely started really). It is available from Cambridge University Press, but also on the web and in PDF format.
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Getting a Big Neo4j Test Box for Cheap!
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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Neo4j Internals
An overview of Neo4j Internals
View more presentations from Tobias Lindaaker
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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Summarize Opinions with a Graph – Part 1
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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Graph Generator
Update: Code to this project is available on Github.
In the US Air Guitar Championships, competitors use their talents to fret on an “invisible” guitar to rock a live crowd and deliver a performance that transcends the imitation of a real guitar and becomes an art form in and of itself. The key factor that determines the winner is having the elusive quality of “Airness“. When considering using Neo4j in a project, one of the key considerations is having a domain model that yields itself to a graph representation. In other words, does your data have “Graphiness“. However, it didn’t dawn on me until recently that when starting a proof of concept, you probably don’t have that data (or enough of it) or maybe your security guys won’t let you within 100 miles of the company production data with this newfangled nosql thingamajig.
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Max De Marzi 