GraphConnect 2018
GraphConnect 2018, Neo4j’s bi-annual conference, was held in New York City in mid-September. It took place right in mid-town Manhattan at the beautiful Marriott Marquis Times Square. I had the opportunity to attend some parts of the conference.
This was the schedule of events:
Keynotes and Sessions (Thursday) Training Sessions (Friday) Ecosystem Summit (Friday) Community Hackathon (Saturday)
History of GraphConnect
The first GraphConnect conference was held in 2012. It is worth noting the community and user growth of Neo4j. I spoke to a participant who attended the first conference 6 years prior who shared that back then about 50 to 100 people attended. This year, over 1000 people attended.
About Neo4j
Neo4j efficiency is derived in using “pointers� to connect data, rather than “indices.� Traditional tabular datasets may contain “sparse matrices� if not all relationships between entities exist which slows down performance and is not optimally efficient.
Neo4j is open-sourced. There is a Community Edition that is available for free and also an Enterprise Edition which is available under a commercial license.
Conference
Neo4j founder Emil Eifrem and iconic data scientist Hilary Mason both delivered fantastic keynotes. Video recordings are publicly available for viewing all the keynote talks (about 90 minutes in duration).
Conference Highlights / Key Takeaways from Emil Eifrem
Seeing our Data as Networks
NoSQL is Resource Intensive / Graphs are Efficient
Popularity of Graphs
Healthcare Application
Hilary Mason
Trainings
Thirteen different training sessions were offered as a separate conference event. Topics included modeling, development, data science and analysis for people at all levels of Neo4j experience:
New to Graphs
Neo4j Basics New Features in Neo4j
Data Scientists and BI/Analysts
Graph Algorithms Data Science and ML Discovery and Visualization with Bloom
Architects, DBAs, and Data Modelers
Intro to Graph Modelling Graph Modelling Clinic
Developers
Python web app development Building apps on the GRANDstack Modeling for Developers (refactoring, evolving, hands-on Cypher) Cypher Tuning & Performance APOC Extensions for Analytics and Operations Graph-Based Natural Language Understanding
Ecosystem Summit
This was a private event to bring together the top Neo4j open source contributors, influencers and inspirational community leaders. Discussions were held in a smaller room. It was an intimate and casual discussion with Neo4j executives.
Hackathon
On Saturday, September 22, there was a free community event, called Neo4j Buzzword Bingo Hackathon, which was a hackathon using the open-source software. Over 120 tech lovers attended this event which was hosted at Stack Overflow.
Social Media
Conference hashtags are:
Twitter Handles
Neo4j Company Milestones
2000: Neo’s founders encountered performance problems with RDBMS and started building the first Neo4j prototype 2002: Developed the first ever version of Neo4j 2003: First 24×7 production Neo4j deployment 2007: Formed a Swedish-based company behind Neo4j. Also open sourced the first graph database, Neo4j, under the GPL 2009: Raised seed funding, $2.5M, from Sunstone and Conor and continued development
First Global 2000 Customer
GraphConnect SF 2012GraphConnect, first conference on graph databases
Resources
Fun
Networking at a Networks Conference
Fun in the DevZone
Learning Neo4j
Original. Reposted with permission.
Related: