- the great momentum that we have in the Neo4jcommunity! Take a look at initiatives like Global Graph Celebration Day, and listen to Neo4j's mad scientist Michael Hunger on graphs, databases and relationships on a different podcast.
- the start of the Neo4j Graphtour, for the 3rd year already, in Amsterdam. This year this actually coincided with the launch of Neo4j 4.0 - one of the best releases of Neo4j that I have personally ever witnessed. I have actually been writing a bit about this myself - read about how I how I child-proofed my beergraph with fine-grained security and how I did something similar by adding security to a fraud investigation graph. There's other articles as well, like When and how to implement Sharding in Neo4j 4.0.
- Various personal graphs projects, like Mark's Australian Open graph and the QuickGraph #3 on Itsu Allergens. I love how Mark summarized it: most of analysis could be done in relational, but "Things got more interesting in the last section where we did set analysis. I found having the data in a graph structure made was helpful for answering these questions, especially when we were looking for the non existence of a relationship."
- a number of Health related articles, like that visualisation of the data from the Personal Genome Project, or the Google project wiuth the “Largest Ever” Map of Brain Connectivity
- And then of course there were various "Other" posts that we really liked, like how to be Working With Spatial Data In Neo4j GraphQL In The Cloud, and the post about Aaia - AWS Identity And Access Management Visualizer And Anomaly Finder. Last but not least, you should also take a look at the Graphaware Hume platform - with an excellent powerful demo recording over here.
Here's the transcription of our chat:
RVB: 00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and this is probably the most embarrassing podcast episode in a long, long time. And that's because it's actually a re-recording. We tried to record the Graphistania V2 podcast episode last week, but yours truly made a big mistake with the audio setup. And that's why we are here again, right? And I'm not alone. I'm here with Stefan Wendin.
SW: 00:00:31.355 Yeah. Hi. Nice to be back again and redoing this. This is like a time machine almost, you could argue. So maybe we should get the Nobel Prize for inventing one. I think it's also a good statement. Sometimes you mess up things, right? And then, just go on it again and redo it. It's about the trajectory. This is why they always just continue doing it and improve over time. So it's just role modelling that behaviour, I guess. So let's do this. Let's have fun, and let's have a great job.
RVB: 00:01:04.579 Yeah. Exactly. So apologies again. I made a mistake with the audio setup last time, which made the recording extremely echoey and unusable. So we are going to do this the proper way now. And we're going to be talking about the wonderful use-cases that we've seen in the last month, in this week, in the Neo4j newsletter. So this month in Neo4j, so to speak, and we've seen some really good ones, right, Stefan? And let's start with some of the great stuff that we've seen in the community in the last couple of weeks. There's been some really great announcements. For example, the GraphTour was kicked off, right? You were there.
SW: 00:01:47.180 Yeah. It was amazing to see the amount of how the community is basically or literally exploding and growing and seeing people joining. I mean, for me, one of the highlights of GraphTour is that I brought along with me persons that were in the audience, actually, from last year. And they demoed their graph project which is now up and running. Such an amazing kind of-- it's a wonderful thing, right? Being in the audience and then next year being on stage is like-- so a super shoutout to the people at ERIKS Digital for that. I mean, meeting also the so-called legend, or what is it that Jim always says about Michael Hunger? It's so nice to meet him as well. He has a couple of beautiful posts around some things as well so also amazing to see. That's also super energetic. Anything that stands out for your side from the event?
RVB: 00:02:44.117 Yeah. Well, I think the GraphTour was also-- the launch of the GraphTour also marked the launch of Neo4j 4.0, right? And I must say, that's also a fantastic milestone for us. People sometimes say it's yet another product release, right? But it's not. It's actually a lot more because it's the culmination of a lot of work and some serious investments that went into it. And actually, I've been playing around with it myself. I've been blogging about it, and I finally managed to secure, or childproof, my beer graph, right? So I'm very happy about that [laughter].
SW: 00:03:23.379 Very, very important. I mean, to secure the beer graph. That's one of the reasons I went here and remember joining, actually. Not because I love beer that much, but I think it's one of those things like how we can use graphs to explain something and find things which you already know but you don't know that you know. So I remember before joining Neo, I was checking it out, and I was so in love of it. So I showed it, actually, in Adidas in Nuremberg and people were like, "Ah, wow, what is this guy talking about beer?" But it's such an amazing thing, and so happy to hear that it's all secure now. But I think it's also, as you said, it's not just that they release. I had some clients saying just the other day like, "Oh yeah, we were thinking, it's the competitors coming closer to Neo, and then you drop this 4.0, and you just skyrocket away." And I think it's one of the best comments you can ever have because so many amazing things, and really like staking the next paradigms of graphs, almost. So yeah, super excited about that and all of the security features.
RVB: 00:04:30.329 Very cool, right? And I think there's a lot of community stuff coming up. We'll have the second version of the Global Graph Celebration Day coming up, which is also a real fun exercise celebrating the birthday of Euler. But actually, I wanted to kind of segue from the 4.0 and the beer graph story because what also struck me this last month is that there's so many people that are actually using Neo4j and using graphs, not just for professional applications, but for their personal stuff, right? I mean I use it for--
SW: 00:05:14.835 For the beer graph [laughter].
RVB: 00:05:16.268 --for the beer graph, exactly. But if you look at, for example, what Mark Needham has been doing, he writes about the Australian Open, or he talks about allergies and how you can model allergies in a graph and discover, actually, really interesting things there. It's very personal, isn't it? I mean people can actually use this to do things that matter in their personal lives.
SW: 00:05:42.876 Yeah. And I think this idea of the quick graph, this is also one of the things that I'm so in love with. And I do work with a lot of business people, not necessarily the most technical or, for sure, not developers. And in a lot of the workshops and sessions that I do, we just pull it up and then put a graph together really, really quick. And the ability to do that and kind of unfold the graph and see the insides, I think it's also one of those things which I just can't get enough of it. And I think the allergens one is super cool as well. I'm super allergic to some fish and most seafoods, so seeing that and how it's connected with all of the different dishes and stuff, and I was like, "Yeah. Story of my life." And I can see it coming alive here. So it's very, very relatable in a sense.
RVB: 00:06:36.479 Very relatable, right? I mean, yeah, everyone knows someone with allergies. I have a son that has a nut allergy. Mark, who was a great friend as well, right, I mean, he's got lots of allergies. And again, that quick graph can illustrate the personal aspects of it. But it also, and this is another segue I suppose, it kind of illustrates how graphs can matter for lots of different health-related capabilities, right? I mean, we know that the health industry or the healthcare industry and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of graph use-cases. But that also kind of became clear this last month, right? There was a couple of really cool stories around that.
SW: 00:07:20.635 Yeah. I mean, visualising all the clinical data stuff and seeing how it all connects. And this is also tying a little bit back, I started my own project doing this myself, just trying to map things out. Because a lot of the way that we use medical things are, again, based upon table structures, which is good for some things, but most of the things in an ecosystem is connected. And I guess, this is also one of those. Did you check out that Google kind of largest-ever map of brain connectivity, the fly brain?
RVB: 00:07:57.548 I thought that was crazy. I mean, I'll put the article in the transcription of this conversation, right? But Google, basically, is much more than an advertising company or a search company, right? They do some really, really interesting, clever, fundamental research. And one of those things is all around mapping how the neurons and the synapses of a brain are connected. And they used this very specific example of a brain map. And I was just thinking, "Wow. Imagine if, in a couple of decades, we could do that very quickly on a human brain, and we could do it in real-time, and we can use it for diagnosis and curing." I mean, the endless possibilities that you can imagine from doing that, I think it's just mind-boggling really, isn't it?
SW: 00:08:51.037 Yeah. It's one of the those really, as you say, mind-boggling things. It's like when you see it happens, you see how far we are because this is a fly, I guess, but also how close we're getting. For me, this is very much a story about trajectory and seeing things coming to life. Not just posting about AI or Artificial Intelligence, where we don't even understand, I would argue, in most cases, how intelligence works from the first place. So for me, this was one of the ones I loved. I especially liked one of the headlines further down in the article. It was something about do-it-yourself neurologies, the world is our oyster or something. And making this available for people, I think is also one of the really cool things. Because again, availability for that is a graph in itself, and it's a network. And using the power and intelligence of the network, it's, again, even cooler in these kind of cases. So yeah, super psyched about that.
RVB: 00:09:52.016 Great. Well, I mean there's a couple of other stories that we'll put in the transcription, but I think we'll leave it at that for this episode of Graphistania. And we'll share that with our listeners in the next couple of days. Hey, Stefan, thank you so much again for doing another take on this recording [laughter].
SW: 00:10:12.724 Another take, yeah [laughter]. It's great. As always, I think for me it's also a good reminder of how just 15 minutes, or whatever it is, of kind of discussing and talking about the different use-cases, kind of help me staying on top of what's going on. So I'm also curious for the one listening. Do you have any of your favourite graph use-cases that you have seen? Please comment, I guess, in the post as well. I mean, that would be super interesting to see what you like and if there is any one that you picked up.
RVB: 00:10:47.943 Let's leave with that. And again, thanks for doing the call with me, and I look forward to next month already.
SW: 00:10:56.408 Me too. Bye-bye.
RVB: 00:10:57.818 Bye. Cheers. Bye.
All the best
Rik
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