Tag Archives: graph database

Jul 12 2018
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Java, Problems, Testing

Building a Dating site with Neo4j – Part Two

We came up with an idea for a dating site and an initial model in Part One. Next we are going to work on a back end HTTP API, because I’m old school and that’s the way I like it. We will build our HTTP API right into Neo4j using an extension which turns Neo4j from a Server into a Service. Unlike last time where we wrote a clone of Twitter, I don’t really know where I’m going with this, so let’s start with some of the obvious API endpoints and then we can design and build more as we go along. Is this Agile or am I just being an idiot? I can’t tell, so onward we go.
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Jul 11 2018
6 Comments
Java, Problems

Building a Dating site with Neo4j – Part One

You might have already heard that Facebook is getting into the Dating business. Other dating sites have been using graphs in the past and we’ve looked at finding love using the graph before. It has been a while though, so let’s return to the topic making use of the new Date and Geospatial capabilities of Neo4j 3.4. I have to warn you though that I’ve been with Helene for almost 15 years and missed out on all this dating site fun, what I do know I blame Colin for it and some pointers from the comments section of this blog post.
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May 30 2018
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Java, Problems

Transmuting Documents into Graphs

Alchemy is a philosophical and protoscientific tradition practiced throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. Its aim is to purify, mature, and perfect certain objects. In popular culture we often see the case of shadowy figures trying to turn lead into gold to make themselves immensely rich or to ruin the world economy. In our case we will not be transmuting lead into gold, but documents into graphs which is just as good. In the past, we had used “Alchemy API” but they were purchased by IBM and retired. You can get similar functionality with IBM Watson, but let’s do something else instead. Let’s add Entity Extraction right into Neo4j.
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May 17 2018
1 Comment
Cypher, Problems

Offers with Neo4j

If you have started or are thinking about starting a Graph project, you ought to get in touch with me. I’ve been involved in hundreds of graph database backed projects and chances are I can point you in the right direction. It doesn’t cost anything to get on a goto meeting for an hour and talk about it. Contact me at max@neo4j.com to schedule it. If you are very serious and have a little budget allocated then I recommend you sign up for one of our bootcamps. You’ll be amazed at what we can accomplish together in a very short time. I’ll even make you a deal, if you sign up for a bootcamp and end up buying a commercial license, we’ll give you a week of professional services absolutely free.
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Mar 23 2018
2 Comments
Cypher, Problems

Scheduling Meetings with Neo4j

One of the symptoms of any fast growing company is the lack of available meeting rooms. The average office worker gets immense satisfaction to their otherwise mundane workday when they get to kick someone else out of the meeting room they booked. Of course that joy can be cut short (along with their career) once realizing some unnoticed VIP was unceremoniously kicked out. It’s not a super exciting use case, but today I’m going to show you how to use Neo4j to perform some scheduling gymnastics.
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Mar 21 2018
7 Comments
Cypher, Problems

Neo4j Geospatial Queries

When I was growing up, the Neo Geo was the high end gaming system around. It was however prohibitively expensive for most people… and definitely out of my price range. I grew up in a mobile home park in Union City, CA. Near the old drive in theater now long gone. It was also next to an industrial park in Hayward where a food truck would make the best burritos $3 could buy. A search for the best burritos in Union City would have missed this food truck gem. Geographic boundaries can be a problem when searching for things by specific places. To get around this problem, we tend to use latitude and longitude and then perform a radius or bounding box search. Today I want to present to you a hybrid approach using Neo4j.

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Mar 12 2018
10 Comments
database

Keeping Properties Secret in Neo4j

We’re an open source company with nothing to hide, but some of our customers have things they need to keep close to their chest. Sometimes you don’t want everybody to have access to salary information, or future predictions. Maybe you want to hide Personally identifiable information (PII) or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) data. In Neo4j 3.4 we are introducing more security controls. We are starting with Role based Database wide property key blacklists. That’s a bit of a mouthful but let’s walk through and example to see one of the ways it can be utilized. Imagine you are working in “Area 51” and have to deal with very important information.
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Feb 23 2018
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Java, Problems

Replicants

In the movie Blade Runner, “replicants” are engineered biological copies of humans. They are implanted with memories that aren’t real (to them anyway, they are sometimes the recorded memories of other people) in order to provide a sort of replacement to their emotions. The replicants are meant to work in outer space and are illegal on earth. The ones that manage to get to earth are hunted down by Deckard and other blade runners. In order to determine who is a replicant and who is a “real person” blade runners use a “Voight-Kampff” test that measures respiration, heart rate, blushing and eye movement in response to emotionally provocative questions. Today we are going to turn Neo4j into a blade runner and use it to find and retire replicated identities in our data.
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Jan 17 2018
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database, Gremlin, Java

Neptune and Uranus

Last year Microsoft announced “Cosmos DB”, a multi-modal database with graph support. I think multi-modal databases are like swiss army knifes, they can do everything, just not very well. I imagine you would design it to be as good as it can be at its main use case while not losing the ability to do other things. So it’s neither fully optimized for its main thing, nor very good at the other things. Maybe you can do pretty well with two things by making a few compromises, but if you try to do everything…it’s just not going to work out.

Can you imagine John Rambo stalking his enemies with an oversized swiss army knife? Here, let me help with the mental image:
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Jan 14 2018
10 Comments
Java, Problems

Dynamic Rule Based Decision Trees in Neo4j

A few posts ago I showed you how to build a Boolean Logic Rules Engine in Neo4j. What I like about it is that we’ve pre-calculated all our potential paths, so it’s just a matter of matching up our facts to the paths to get to the rule and we’re done. But today I am going to show you a different approach where we are going to have to calculate what is true as we go along a decision tree to see which answer we get to.

Yes, it will be a bit slower than the first approach, but we avoid pre-calculation. It also makes things a bit more dynamic, as we can change the decision tree variables on the fly. The idea is to merge code and data into one, to gain the benefit of agility.

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