Over the weekend I’ve watched two interviews with people working on Neo4j. Each of them covers it from a different angle: Ian Robison’s interview is the technical one, while Emil Eifrem is giving more of the vision, business, enterprise interview. Pick the type of topic you like and watch it. Both are great though.

If you like going back in time, I’ve found a couple of old presentations from and interviews with Emil Eifrem:

• December 2010
• July 2010
• July 2009

Original title and link: Neo4j Interviews: The Vision, the Business and Enterprise Talk, and the Tech (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Neo Technology’s hiring announcement is clear about their intention:

“[…] you will be resonsible for building, managing, and maintaining a 24x7 NOSQL Databases-as-a-Service operation […]”

In the graph databases space, OrientDB is offering a hosting solution NuvolaBase, but I have no numbers about their business so far.

Original title and link: Neo Technology Is H… Wait, It’s Building Neo4j-As-A-Service (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

The main page of InfiniteGraph, a graph database commercialized by Objectivity, features an interesting comparison of 7 graph databases (InfiniteGraph, Neo4j, AllegroGraph, Titan, FlockDB, Dex, OrientDB) based on 16 criteria: licensing, source, scalability, graph model, schema model, API, query method, platforms, consistency, concurrency (distributed processing), partitioning, extensibility, visualizing tools, storage back end/persistency, language, backup/restore.

Unfortunately the image is almost unreadable, but Peter Karussell has extracted the data in a GoogleDoc spreadsheet embedded below.

A two part article by Thiago Jackiw providing a brief explanation of what graph databases and Neo4j are and a quick look at 3 Ruby libraries for Neo4j: Neo4j.rb¹, Neography², and Neoid³

This article demonstrated how to install Neo4j and the basic idea of how to integrate it with a Ruby/Rails application using the different solutions available. Even though the examples given here barely scratched the surface of Neo4j, it should hopefully give you enough knowledge and curiosity to start integrating it on your own projects.

Original title and link: Using Neo4j Graph Database With Ruby (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

The next version of Neo4j will remove the dependency on ZooKeeper for high availability setups. In a post on Neo4j blog, the team has announced the availability of the 1st milestone of Neo4j 1.9 which already contains the new implementation of Neo4j High Availability Cluster:

With Neo4j 1.9 M01, cluster members communicate directly with each other, based on an implementation of the Paxos consensus protocol for master election.

According to the updated documentation annotated with my own comments:

• Write transactions can be performed on any database instance in a cluster. (nb: writes are performed on the master first, but the cluster does the routing automatically)
• If the master fails a new master will be elected automatically. A new master is elected and started within just a few seconds and during this time no writes can take place (the writes will block or in rare cases throw an exception)
• If the master goes down any running write transaction will be rolled back and new transactions will block or fail until a new master has become available.
• The cluster automatically handles instances becoming unavailable (for example due to network issues), and also makes sure to accept them as members in the cluster when they are available again.
• Transactions are atomic, consistent and durable but eventually propagated out to other slaves. (nb: a transaction includes only the write to the master)
• Updates to slaves are eventual consistent by nature but can be configured to be pushed optimistically from master during commit. (nb: writes to slave will still not be part of the transaction)
• In case there were changes on the master that didn’t get replicated before it failed, there are chances to reach a situation where two different versions exists—if the failed master recovers. This situation is resolved by having the old master dismiss its copy of the data (nb the documentation says move away)
• Reads are highly available and the ability to handle read load scales with more database instances in the cluster.

Original title and link: Next Neo4j Version Implementing HA Without ZooKeeper (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)