Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 9 - The one about the (Graph Databases for) Dummies (book)

Here's a nice new episode of the Graphistania podcast for you: for the first time in 5 years, I was able to get the fantastically awesome Chief Scientist of Neo4j, Dr. Jim Webber, back to the podcast. Jim is a great colleague and friend, and one of the best tech public speakers in the business - especially when you want to talk Graphs and distributed systems. Over the past few months, I had the pleasure of working together with Jim on a more regular basis - as we actually wrote a book together: the Graph Databases for Dummies book. It was announced on the Neo4j blog, and seems to have been doing really well in the past few weeks. Some of you may remember that Jim co-wrote The O'Reilly book on Graph Databases, and I wrote Learning Neo4j by Packt (2nd edition together with Jérôme Baton) - and we have had a bit of friendly banter going back and forth about the quality of both artifacts :) ... it has been a ton of fun.

So here's the chat that we recorded about the new book - hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Graphistania · Graphistania 2.0 - Episode 9

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB - 00:00:00.151 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen, from Neo4j, and here I am again recording another episode of our Graphistania podcast. And this is a special one. This is a special episode, one that we've been talking about for some time, because I have a very special guest on this show, and that is my dear friend and colleague Jim Webber. Hey, Jim.

Podcast Interview with Amy Hodler, Neo4j

Yes! Another great interview for our podcast, this time with a great colleague of mine who has a big mind and many ideas around one of the most fascinating and under-used topics evah: Graph Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence. Amy Hodler has a lot to say on this topic, and is about to publish a fantastic new book on the topic together with Mark Needham. I think you will enjoy this one - even though it's a bit longer than usual. Here goes:


Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB:  00:00:00.938 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo4j, and here we are again, recording another episode of our Graphistania Graph Database Podcast. And tonight I have a dear colleague of mine on the other side of this Google call, and that's Amy Hodler. Amy, how are you?

Podcast Interview with Nicolas Mervaillie, GraphAware

Here's another great interview with a long time Graphista that has done a lot of really interesting work in our French community, and is now having lots of graph-fun at GraphAware: Nicolas Mervaillie. Nicolas has been and still is working on some really cool stuff - so a chat was long overdue! Here's our recording - including a fancy new jingle from PremiumBeat ("Fantastic Voyage", by Olive Musique):

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:00:03.275 Hello everyone, my name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo and here I am again on a Skype call, recording the next episode in our Graphistania podcast. And today I have a-- I would say an oldtimer in our Neo4j community on the other side of this Skype call, all the way from Lille in France, and that's Nicolas Mervaillie. Hey Nicolas, how are you? 

NM: 00:00:26.083 Hey, good morning Rik. Thanks for inviting me.  

Podcast Interview with Nicolas Rouyer, Orange

It's been a few crazy busy weeks and therefore a bit slower on the Podcasting front, but I still want to keep up this community effort, and so here we are again. I spoke to a dear community member from Toulouse, France: Nicolas Rouyer. Nicolas has been a driving force in the local community in Toulouse, and has also presented his experience with Neo4j at numerous meetups and GraphConnect conferences:

So I definitely wanted to have a chat with him, and here's the result:

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:01 Hello everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo. And here I am again recording another episode of our Graphistania podcast. It's been a while since we've had some European guests on the podcast, so I'm very happy to have Nicolas Rouyer from Orange in France on the podcast. Hi Nicolas. 

NR: 00:23 Hi, Rik. How are you?

Finally: Hands-on Use Case Examples of my book

Dammit. Sometimes you make mistakes and sometimes you make bigger mistakes. I just found out about something that must have fallen through the cracks, and that I should have done last fall when my Learning Neo4j book first came out. In that book, there are two elaborate chapters with use case examples. I spent quite a bit of time making, testing and writing these examples - with the clear intention of publishing them. And then I didn't, it seems. I was convinced that I had published them, but it seems like I just forgot. Dammit * 2.

So now I have put that right. All the use case examples can be replayed at your own pace in your own local Neo4j server. I have put them all on this Github Gist. In total there are three use case examples that have been developed:

• Chapter 6: Recommendations with Neo4j;
• Chapter 7, example 1: Impact Analysis with Neo4j;
• Chapter 7, example 2: Impact Simulation with Neo4j.

Each of the gists has two parts:

1. A part where we create the graph. You should copy and past these into the Neo4j Shell. If you want to skip this part, then you can also download the graph.db folders: all of them at once in once zipfile, the recommendations graph.db zipfile, the impactanalysis graph.db zipfile, the impact simulation graph.db zipfile. They were all made with Neo4j 2.2RC1, fyi. 
2. A part where we query the graph. You should explore those in the Neo4j Browser web interface.

Hope this is useful. And sorry for not having done this sooner.

Cheers

Rik

Why write a book about Neo4j?

Some of you may have noticed some noise recently about the little book that I wrote: Learning Neo4j. I added a link at the top of this page as well, with some more information. I obviously also wanted to also announce this publication on the blog, but while thinking about it - I thought it would also be interesting to go back and see why I wrote the book - my objectives. Time will tell if I will have achieved all of them - but anyways....

Here we go - in order of descending importance:

1. I wanted to help the Neo4j community grow. For the past two years, I have had tremendous joy and excitement by working on different Neo4j related projects with community users AND commercial clients. But it has always struck me what a micro-cosmos it is that these "graphistas" work and live in. It seemed at times like I was part of an obscure cult of math-loving programmers with questionable personal hygiene... :) ... haha... But seriously: it's such a niche. The world of Enterprise IT is out there, and if the Neo4j project is to grow, it will need to look to new audiences. Not the astrophysicist with multiple PhD's that dreams Java-code - but the typical, Visual-Basic-loving Enterprise Developer. You will find that there is not a line of Java-code in the book. That is because 1) I don't know how to code, and 2) that was not the intention of the book. Graph Databases need to become easy to learn if they are to grow up.
   
2. I thought it would be a cool personal experience. I have always enjoyed writing - it helps me get through the day, basically. Structure my thoughts, reflect on them, and all that. That's why I have a blog :) ... But writing a book is something different. It took me 7.5 months of daily work (sometimes hours at a time, sometimes just a few emails) to get it done - and there is a cool sense of achievement when it "gets done". I liked that a lot. To be honest: I think this is not the last book that I have written.
   
3. I wanted to get some personal benefit from it. Whether it's in the form of recognition by the friendly folks at Neo Technology, or in a royalty payment that will pay for a nice Xmas ski-trip, or - and this is my big hope too - because I would be able to sell millions (!) of Euros worth of Neo4j Enterprise software as the result of someone picking up that book (see 1.). 

Those were probably the main reasons. And of course: Michael Hunger stimulating me to do it, and Ian Robinson giving me some pointers and ideas. 

Anyway. There you have it. It's out there, and I hope you like it. If you do - tell other people. If you don't - please tell ME!

Cheers

Rik