“Neo4j is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables. A graph (mathematical lingo for a network) is a flexible data structure that allows a more agile and rapid style of development.”
Neo4j allows you to map objects to nodes and relations, that is a more natural fit than mapping them to relational tables. Modeling with elements of a graph is substantially faster for semistructured data (Recall that semistructured data is data that has few mandatory but many optional attributes).
Neo4j is a powerful graph database/engine that every rails developer should know.
It turns out that I got involved with neo4j evluating a graph-databse for several graph-intensive operations we had to perform over an 8million vertices/100million edges graph. I decided to give a talk in the Spanish Rails Confenrence 2010 about Neo4j and graph-databases.
The title of my talk was Neo4j for Ruby on Rails
I did cover:
- An overview of the technology of graph databases (particularly neo4j database)
- How to model your world with nodes, relationships and properties.
- How to use neo4j with jruby, neo4j-rails for ruby on rails and neo4j-rest JSON REST API
- Implement simple graph recommender (using traversals), and compare it to a global recommender (using the whole graph at once)
Neo4j and Rails - Conferencia Rails 2010 from pablete on Vimeo.
Here are some photos (thanks @valakirka):
Pablo Delgado
Data Scientist/Engineer working at Opentable Inc.
Follow @pablete