Revisiting contact tracing with Neo4j 4.4's transaction batching capabilities

Yes! It's been a few months, but Saint Nicholas just brought us a brand new and shiny release of Neo4j 4.4 to play with. One of the key features is a generic transaction batching capability, similar to what we have been using in apoc.periodic.iterate but now built right into the core of the database. It is referred to as the CALL in Transaction capability - and of course it is a really interesting feature.

So in this article I will be revisiting this blogpost, but without the need for APOC's apoc.periodic.iterate feature. Let's see how that goes.

Create a synthetic contact tracing graph - size of Antwerp

The first step of course is going to be similar to, if not exactly the same as, the work I did in 2020 on contact tracing. Take a look at (http://blog.bruggen.com/2020/06/what-recommender-systems-and-contact.html) to see how that went. The key thing to recall there is that I was using the fantastic faker plugin. You can download it yourself from the github page. Install is super easy. Just need to make sure the config is updated too - and that you whitelisted fkr.* just like you do with gds.* and apoc.*.

As with the previous post, I will be pushing the scale up to the size of my home city of Antwerp, Belgium. And critically, we would not even use APOC - but use the transaction batching instead.