Here's the transcription of the interview:
RVB: Hello, everyone. My name is Rik and today I'm in sunny Amsterdam recording another podcast for our Graph Database podcast. We have a new guest which is the ever charming Mr. Jim Webber. Hey, Jim.
JW: Hello, Rick, how you doing?
RVB: Doing very well. The sun is shining and it's a beautiful day outside. People might not know you that well so why don't you introduce yourself? What's your link to the wonderful world of graph databases?
JW: My name's Jim Webber and I'm Neo4J's chief scientist. My link to graph databases goes back to about 2008 when I first started to use Neo4J and ultimately contribute to the database before I joined the Neo team about four-and-a-half years ago.
RVB: That's great. So in this podcast, I really don't have a lot of questions. The two really most important questions are what do you love most about Neo or graph databases and where do you see this going, so let's start with the start. Can you tell us a little bit about what you really love about graph databases and why it's the best thing since sliced bread?
JW: It may even be better than sliced bead. There's two answers, really, Rick. At the moment, I work on the inside of Neo4j and I've got to say that it's a joy and a privilege to do some really fascinating computer science research and development work that people then take and build amazing systems on. But that amazing systems aspect is really what got me hooked in the first place as an Neo4j user.
JW: In what feels like an eternity ago now, I was faced with a challenge of building a product catalog in a telecoms company and modeling in this product catalog things that the business users wanted, particularly up-sell - knowing what products you already had, being able to price those products as a bundle, and importantly being able to cross-sell and up-sell to you to increase your value as a customer. Back in the day, we were going to do that with a mixture of off the shelf software and customization relational databases. We thought that give or take, it would take about three years before we had up-sell functionality implemented.
JW: I bumped into Emil Eifrem, one of the founders of Neo4J, quite accidentally in the bleak depths of a sudden Swedish winter and he explained to me that really, my model was a graph. I kind of got that at a conceptual level. I knew that things depended on other things and so on. But then Emil told me about this thing called Neo4J where the graphs were represented as first class citizens in the database. I've got to say that didn't sit comfortably with me. The database for us back then, that was all about the relational database. While I understood in my Java code or whatever I was going to have a bunch of objects connected together in my database, I expected tables.
JW: Anyway, I went back to work and thought, "What was that funny named database that that Swedish guy told me about?" We gave it a go and actually within an afternoon - admittedly a long afternoon - we spiked out what it would mean to do a product catalog for telcoms and implement up-sell, and that really blew away. The first time I ran a query in Neo - and it wasn't Neo as we know it today, it was an early version of Neo - didn't have the wonderful cipher query language or any of that stuff, just really did a simple graft traversal. But when it told me given my starting product what I should buy next, blew me away. I honestly thought I'd built Skynet and then you think, "I haven't actually, I've just done a graph traversal." But from that moment on, I was hooked because we took a problem that we thought might take three years to deliver and we delivered it in order of magnitude hours. Being able to conceptualize a problem as graphs makes things that were previously intractable readily tractable and I was hooked from there on in.
RVB: That's super. So in summarizing, it's all about the model? Is that-- it's the model that most attracts you to it?
JW: So the graph model, I think, is the most expressive and pleasant model that I've ever worked with, because it matches the way that I think many of us think as humans about stuff being connected to other stuff - kind of rich, semantically-driven network. What attracts me to Neo is that it was the technology that supported that model that was leagues ahead of everything I've ever seen before, and even today is still leagues ahead because it's by far the most mature graph database available. So If I want to adopt the most expressive and straightforward and pleasurable model, and indeed in many cases the most performing model, that's graphs. If I want the technology that supports that, that's Neo.
RVB: Super. Preaching to the choir, but I couldn't agree more. The follow-up question is where is it going? As the chief scientist, you're perfectly placed to answer that question. Where would you see the technology in five years from now and what's a realistic objective there?
JW: I guess there are two levels to that answer. There's the business impact that the technology's going to have, then there's the technology itself, and I think they're both fascinating. Right now my sense is that graphs are primed for the big time. You look at all the indicators that we have, all of the metrics that the analysts are running, and graphs are by far outstripping all other database categories, even those equal in terms of growth right now. There's something that's built up and pent up and now graphs are a thing. Not just Neo4j, although Neo4j is leading the charge, but graph tech as a whole is really taking off. I think that at some point in the medium term we're going to look at graphs in the same way we look at relational today - it's just going to be the data model. I'm super confident about that.
JW: Where are we going in terms of Neo4j and its implementation technology? Well, where are we not going? There's years of computer science ahead of us, some of which is already written down. The academic community has been doing some very pioneering work there. But to boil it down to a few podcastable sound bites, I think there's a bunch of work that's going to happen around query languages. I think that cipher query language is going to go from strength to strength. I think those guys are going to figure out better and better ways of doing query planning and optimization, potentially even things like your parallel queries and distributed queries and so on.
JW: In terms of the database engine itself, it's a whole bunch of fundamental concurrent programming, algorithms, and data structure stuff where we're going to be pushing the limits in terms of performance and robustness. Indeed in terms of the distribution system stuff, which is in my background, I think we've seen a resurgence of incredibly high performance transaction protocols which all but detonate the reasons for having soft state and eventual consistency because they eliminate so many of the unavailability and un-performant characteristics of traditional 2PC. So I think we're going to see a resurgence of extremely high performant, high concurrency transaction processing and commit protocols. I'm definitely looking forward to living in that world in the next few years.
RVB: That is a super answer and I'm really looking forward to living that together with you. It's going to be an exciting ride. Thank you so much for the time, Jim, and I look forward to speak to you again.
JW: Pleasure. Thanks, Rick.
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Before I leave you, just two more things:
- after this interview, Jim and I spent another half hour laughing ourselves into a dent because the Doctor had misunderstood one of my closing comments (underlined and bold above): he thought - being in Amsterdam and all that - that I said "I look forward to living together with you" - instead of what I really said. Wishful on his part, probably, but it did give us a lot of giggles :) ...
- there's a reason the interview has the song below, performed by Wilco and Billie Bragg. Woody Guthrie's commentary on the "big depression" bankers seems ever so actual today. And I think Jim would like this cover.
Rik
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