Max De Marzi

One of the things that made me fall head over heals for Neo4j so many years ago was just how extensible it was. If the database engineering team was busy rebuilding the clustering feature for the third time and didn’t have time to take care of my feature requests… I could just add them myself. Not to Neo4j directly, no that would have been a horrible mess. Instead I could add any feature I wanted as an “Unmanaged Extension”. Later on they became Cypher Stored Procedures, but it was basically the same thing. You had access to the top level Java API that dealt with Nodes and Edges. You could use the Traversal API that dealt with Paths….and if you were feeling extra spicy that day you could go down to the Storage API that dealt with Cursors over raw bytes.

I had spent prior jobs working with Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server so I never had that kind of power and freedom before. Well, it took a long time, but that power has come to MySQL in the form of a change tracking fork called VillageSQL. There are already a bunch of extensions that add UUID, Network Address custom types, Cryptographic Functions, Multi-Dimensional Geometry as well as AI helpers. So of course I had to try it out. I decided to add an extension for one of my other great loves, the Roaring Bitmap data structure.