Rik Van Bruggen about data modeling in Neo4j:

One of the things that spurred the discussion was - probably not coincidentally - the AlcoholPercentage. Many people were expecting that to be a property of the Beerbrand - but instead in my beergraph, I had “pulled it out”. The main reason at the time was more coincidence than anything else, but when you think of it - it’s actually a fantastic thing to “pull things out” and normalise the data model much further than you probably would in a relational model. By making the alcoholpercentage a node of its own, it allowed me to do more interesting queries and pathfinding operations - which led to interesting beer recommendations. Which is what this is all about, right?

I can see where this is going, but I’m not sure I agree it’s the right approach. Basically in this case it works because the domain of the field is both discrete and small. Ideally, though, what you’d actually want is an index that could give you nodes that are “close-to-some value” (e.g.: “give me the beers in the 6.9-7.1 range”)

Original title and link: Neo4j Blog: Reloading my Beergraph - using an in-graph-alcohol-percentage-index (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://blog.neo4j.org/2013/05/reloading-my-beergraph-using-in-graph.html

The emphasis is on without XML:

With the maturing of Spring-Data I started porting all my personal projects to use Spring Data for bootstrapping.

Quite a bit of annotations needs, but I’d go with that instead of XML.

Original title and link: Bootstrapping Neo4j With Spring-Data…without XML (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://codepitbull.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/bootstrapping-neo4j-with-spring-data-without-xml/

Alex Soto:

Spring Data Neo4j is the project within Spring Data project which provides an extension to the Spring programming model for writing applications that uses Neo4j as graph database. To write tests using NoSQLUnit for Spring Data Neo4j applications, you do need nothing special apart from considering that Spring Data Neo4j uses a special property called type in graph nodes and relationships which stores the fully qualified classname of that entity.

Is there a BigDataUnit framework? My only requirement is to use XML. Heavily.

Original title and link: A Quick Guide to Testing Spring Data Neo4j With NoSQLUnit (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2013/03/testing-spring-data-neo4j-applications-with-nosqlunit.html

Pretty interesting usage of Neo4j for visualizing Bitcoin block chain:

Source code available on GitHub.

Original title and link: Neo4j-Based Bitcoin Block Chain Visualizer (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: https://github.com/thallium205/BitcoinVisualizer

Jackrabbit still has a very special place in my heart. I’ve fought it many times, sometimes losing, most of the time winning. But for over 7 years now, it is still the main storage engine serving the content of InfoQ. So this OrientDB engine for Jackrabbit by Thomas Kratz caught my attention:

This has some limitations, as jackrabbit will still access only one node at a time, being able to traverse the graph at the storage level is simply not intended by the whole api. But it works, it’s readable, can be modified at the db level easily.

Original title and link: A Human-Readable Jackrabbit Persistence Manager Prototype for Orientdb (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://thomaskratz.blogspot.de/2013/01/a-human-readable-jackrabbit-persistence.html

Interesting as an exercise considering Max de Marzi shared all the code on GitHub, but completely unrelated to the breadth and depth of the Facebook Graph Search.

Original title and link: Using Treetop and Neo4j Cypher to Simulate Facebook Graph Search (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://maxdemarzi.com/2013/01/28/facebook-graph-search-with-cypher-and-neo4j/

Derrick Harris for GigaOm:

Graph database startup Neo Technology has raised another $11 million, providing more fuel to the fire of specialized databases. Whether they’re graph databases organizing data by relationships, or geospatial databases concerned with where stuff is located, everyone is trying capitalize on myriad new data sources available.

According to my calculations this brings Neo Technology at $24.1 millions ($10.6M in Sept.2011 and $2.5 in Oct.2009).

Original title and link: Neo Technology Raises Another $11mil for Neo4j Graph Database (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://gigaom.com/data/graph-startup-neo-raises-11m-as-specialized-databases-take-hold/