Using Apache Zeppelin with Neo4j to analyse the FinCEN Files

Last week, we got another great and widely publicised case of Graph Databases' usefulness throw our way. The ICIJ published their FinCEN Files research, and on top of allowing you to explore the data on their website they also published an anonymised subset of the data as a series of CSV/JSON files. My friends and colleagues Michael Hunger, Will Lyon and the rest of the team, helped with the process of making this subset available as a Neo4j database (see this github repo), and there's even a super easy FinCEN Files Neo4j Sandbox that you can spin up in no time for some investigation fun.

So of course I had to take this data for a spin myself - it seems really important to me that more eyeballs are looking at this, and more people exposing the sometimes very questionable behaviour of the world's largest financial institutions.

Introducing Zeppelin

I had heard of some great technology a while ago that would allow people to use their data in a very different way, by looking at these interactive webpages that would interact with a Neo4j database.

Podcast Interview with Johannes Unterstein, Neo4j

A couple of months ago, we had a great Online Meetup that was all about scaling out Neo4j using containerisation and container orchestration technologies. You can see the recording over here:


That was really cool, and a great execuse to invite my nowadays *colleague* Johannes Unterstein to the podcast. Johannes has a really interesting history and a lot of expertise in these technologies, and could really talk about them for our audience. So here's our chat:



Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:00:00.399 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and here I am again after the holiday period recording another Graphistania podcast. And today I have the pleasure of welcoming one of my dear engineering colleagues on this podcast episode, and that's Johannes Unterstein from Germany. Hi, Johannes.