Graphconnect Europe 2017 schedule graph

Countdown has begun! Two weeks from now we'll be bringing together the entire European Graph Community in London again, for the annual Graphconnect Conference. Every year, it's something to really live up to, to rally our customers and users to attend as we really believe in the "power of relationships" that are formed and strengthened at conferences like this.

So of course, we had to pull out the old trick (started at Oredev 2014 actually - so quite some time ago!) of creating a "Conference Schedule Graph" for everyone to explore.

Autocompleting Neo4j - part 4/4 of a Googly Q&A

In the first, second and third posts in this series, I got round to finally aswering some of the more interesting "frequently asked questions" that Google seems to be getting on the topic of Neo4j.

Today, we'll continue the last part of that Q&A, and answer two more questions which - funnily enough - are kind of related. They both deal with the query language that people use to interact with their graph database. Neo4j has been pioneering openCypher of course, but clearly there are alternatives out there - and people need to make an informed choice between query languages, of course.

Autocompleting Neo4j - part 3/4 of a Googly Q&A

In the first and second post in this series, I explained and started to explore some of the more interesting "frequently asked questions" that seem to surround Neo4j on the interwebs.
Today, we'll continue that journey, and talk about Lucene, transaction support, and SOLR. Should be fun!

2. Does Neo4j use Lucene

This one is a lot simpler to answer - luckily - than the scale question that we tackled in the previous post. The answer is: YES, Neo4j does indeed leverage the (full-text) indexing capabilities of Lucene to create "graph indexes" on specific node-label-property combinations.

Autocompleting Neo4j - part 2/4 of a Googly Q&A

So in the previous post, I explained my plan of doing a series of blogposts around the most frequently asked Google questions as recorded and suggested by Google's Autocomplete feature.

We'll start this week with the most asked question of all - which I get all the time from users and customers - and it's the inevitable "scale" question. Let's do this.

1. Does Neo4j Scale

Let's start at the beginning, with the first question that lots of people ask is: "Does Neo4j scale?" Interesting. Should not surprise anyone in an age of "big data" right? Let's tackle that one.

To me, this is one of the trickiest and most difficult things to answer - for the simple reason that "to scale" can mean many different things to many different people. However, I think there are a couple of distinct things that people mean with the question - it least that's my experience. So let's try to go through those - noting that this is by no means an exhaustive discussion on "scalability" - just a my 0,02 Euros.

Autocompleting Neo4j - part 1/4 of a Googly Q&A

As you can probably tell from this blog, I have been working in the wonderful world of Graphs for quite some time now - Neo4j remains to be one of the coolest and inspiring products I have ever seen in my 20 odd years in the IT industry, and it certainly has been a thrill to be part of so many commercial and community projects around the technology in the past 5 years. Not to mention the wonderful friends and colleagues that I have found along the way.

One thing that does keep on amazing me in working with Neo4j, is the never ending

• stream of use cases, industries and functional domains where graphs and graph databases can be useful
• stream of new audiences that we continue to educate and inform on the topic. Every time we do a meetup or an event, we seem to tap a new source of people that are just starting their journey into the wonderful world of graphs - and that we get to talk to and work with along the way.

When dealing with these new audiences, it's also pretty clear that we ... keep on having the same types of conversations time and time again. Every new graphista that gets added to the community, is asking the same or similar kinds of questions... and most likely, they are going to google for answers.

This leads me to the topic of this blogpost, which is both fun and serious at the same time: we are going to try and autocomplete neo4j :) ...

Autocompleting? What's that again?

When we talk about autocomplete, we talk about this amazing technology that Google has built into it's search functionality, that completes your search query as you type - often times "guessing" what you will be looking for most likely before you even thought about it... it can be pretty interesting, even eerily scary sometimes...