Graphs are increasingly important as data can be represented as nodes connected by relationships. A graph database like Neo4j allows for flexible modeling of data relationships and powerful querying of connected data. Neo4j provides faster and more scalable solutions compared to relational databases for workloads involving complex joins and real-time transactions on connected data. Customers like Airbus have seen 10x performance improvements using Neo4j for design dependency analysis by mapping dependencies between assets as a graph.

1. Graphs are Eating the World
Dave Fauth
david.fauth@neotechnology.com

2. Why a Graph Database?

4. id name
1
Los
Angeles
2 New York
Locations
id name
1 Michelle
2 Hank
3 Jenny
Employees
id name
1 Public
2 Sensitive
AssetGroups
id name
1 Finance
2 IT
Departments
id name
1
Fortune
Forecast
2
Jan Press
Release
Resources
emp loc
1 1
2 2
3 2
Employees_Locations
emp dept
1 1
2 1
3 2
Employees_Departments
emp group
1 1
2 1
2 2
3 2
Employees_AssetGroups
rsrc group
1 1
2 2
Resources_AssetGroups
Who in the finance department living in New York
has access to the Fortune Forecast?

5. Who in the finance department living in New York
has access to the Fortune Forecast?

7. The Whiteboard Model Is the Physical Model

8. CAR
name: “Dan”
born: May 29, 1970
twitter: “@dan”
name: “Ann”
born: Dec 5, 1975
since:
Jan 10, 2011
brand: “Volvo”
model: “V70”
Property Graph Model Components
Nodes
• The objects in the graph
• Can have name-value properties
• Can be labeled
LOVES
LOVES
LIVES WITH
PERSON PERSONRelationships
• Relate nodes by type and direction
• Can have name-value properties

9. Relational Versus Graph Models
Relational Model Graph Model
KNOWS
ANDREAS
TOBIAS
MICA
DELIA
Person FriendPerson-Friend
ANDREAS
DELIA
TOBIAS
MICA

10. Graph Query Language: Cypher
MATCH (:Person { name:“Dan”} ) -[:LOVES]-> (:Person { name:“Ann”} )
LOVES
Dan Ann
NODE NODE
LABEL PROPERTYLABEL PROPERTY

11. MATCH (c:City)-[*..2]->(co:Country{name:'Canada'})
RETURN c.name;
Express Complex Queries Easily with Cypher
Find all cities in Canada
Cypher Query
MS SQL Query
WITH AreasCTE AS
(
--anchor select, start with the country of Canada, which will be
the root element for our search
SELECT AreaID, AreaName, ParentAreaID, AreaType
FROM dbo.Area
WHERE AreaName = 'Canada'
UNION ALL
--recursive select, recursive until you reach a leaf (an Area which
is not a parent of any other area)
SELECT a.AreaID, a.AreaName, a.ParentAreaID, a.AreaType
FROM dbo.Area a
INNER JOIN AreasCTE s ON a.ParentAreaID = s.AreaID
)
--Now, you will have all Areas in Canada, so now let's filter by the
AreaType "City"
SELECT * FROM AreasCTE
where AreaType = 'City'
https://myadventuresincoding.wordpress.com/2014/05/02/sql-server-simple-recursive-query-example/

12. Short demo!

13. Neo4j is leading the
world’s fastest growing
database segment:
Graph Databases

14. RDBMS
Hadoop
DB-Engines is an independent site using objective data from Google Trends, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, etc.
Growth rate over time

15. adidas
Neo4j is relied on by:
…and over
150 others

16. “We found Neo4j to be literally thousands of times faster
than our prior MySQL solution, with queries that require 10
to 100 times less code. Today, Neo4j provides eBay with
functionality that was previously impossible.”
Volker Pacher
Senior Developer

17. BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
Neo4j Customer
Journey
IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES

18. BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
Neo4j Customer
Journey

19. Identifying Challenges
Business Challenges
• Competitor pressure
• Real-time response time
• Need to do 10x more
with 10x less
• Growth pushing old
systems against the wall
Architecture Challenges
• The requirements will
change later
• Iterative development
clashes with schema
• Real-time reads with
simultaneous writes
Development Challenges
• Poor JOIN performance
• Building a flexible &
extendable data model
• Transactional operation
• Code becoming hard to
evolve

20. BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
Neo4j Customer
Journey

21. IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
Neo4j Customer
Journey

22. Everyone collects data today.
“Store first, ask questions later”
Better Data

23. There is another dimension
beyond data volume:
Data Relationships
Better Data

24. Invoice
Total: $10
To: Peter, Acme Inc.
Imagine it’s the 90’s and you
have an invoicing system.
Accounting
System
Better Data

25. Now imagine it’s today.
Accounting
System
Invoice
Total: $10
To: Peter, Acme Inc.
Better Data

26. Invoice
Total: $10
To: Peter, Acme Inc.
Products
Categories
Companies
Market
Segments
People
Invoices actually have a lot of information.
Better Data

27. Invoice
Total: $10
To: Peter, Acme Inc.
• What kind of products do customers in a certain
market segment buy?
• What items could we recommend to this
customer, based on what other people have
bought?
• What kind of customer shops in a certain
category?
Products
Categories
Companies
Market
Segments
People
Better Data

28. Ignore data relationships and you
will miss these insights.
Put your data relationships to work and
make the most of the data you already
have!
Invoice
Total: $10
To: Peter, Acme Inc.
Products
Categories
Companies
Market
Segments
People
Better Data

29. IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
Neo4j Customer
Journey

30. BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPSIDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
Neo4j Customer
Journey

31. Better Development
“Yeah… so we need to store and
query data relationships as a graph.
We will use a tabular database
because it’s what we always use.”
You what,
mate?

32. Better Development
Don’t reinvent the wheel! It’s costly and will set you back.
Let Neo4j do the heavy lifting for you. We have spent over a
decade with 200+ customers building the world’s leading
graph database.
Keep your team focused on building your product and
business, not a complex database solution.

33. Better Development
Say goodbye to
denormalized query
views
Query live data as it’s
being updated, all in real
time with Cypher or Java
APIs
Scale your infrastructure
proportionally and
reasonably
Orders-of-magnitude
improvement on modest
hardware

34. BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPSIDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
Neo4j Customer
Journey
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE

35. BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPSIDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
Neo4j Customer
Journey

36. Focus usually shifts from asking
– How do we solve this?
to
– Wow! What else can we do?
Climbing the stairs is
significantly easier the
second time
Better Decisions

37. Journey Example
IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE
– The SQL
queries are
prohibitively slow.
– It makes a lot of
sense to look at
our data as a
graph.
– There is a great
product available,
built for graphs.
– How can we use
this tool and way of
thinking to improve
our business?

38. The Core of
Why Neo4j
IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE

39. BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
BETTER DATA
Start getting value from
the Data Relationships
in your business
Maintain momentum
and keep your team
focused and effective
The Core of Why Neo4j

40. Selected Case Study

41. Airbus
Design Dependency Analysis

42. Airbus
• 63’000 employees
• €60 Billion revenue in 2014
• 437 operators globally:

43. Airbus – The Challenge
• Aircraft design process generates
large amounts of design assets
• A given part of the model may be
referenced in many places
• It becomes increasingly costly to
analyze the impact of a change

44. Airbus – Evaluating Neo4j
• By mapping the dependencies among the assets, impact can be
understood up-front immediately
• 10x required performance with
100 million items and 1B+ links
• Neo4j evaluated in
short amount of time
with expert assistance

45. Airbus – Value of Solution
• Shifting a slow process to become
real-time, increasing productivity
while reducing frustration and
mistakes
• Engineers can immediately validate
changes being made against the
relevant dependencies
• Focus shifted from “how do we
build this” to “what should we build
next?”

46. Airbus – Value of Solution
• Leverage data relationships
between design assets to
work smarter
• Allow engineers to spend more
time on valuable work by
making impact and dependency
analysis very simple
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
BETTER DATA

47. BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
BETTER DATA
Start getting value from
the Data Relationships
in your business
Maintain momentum
and keep your team
focused and effective
The Core of Why Neo4j

48. Neo4j Customer
Journey
IDENTIFYING
CHALLENGES
BETTER DATA
FOCUS ON DATA
RELATIONSHIPS
BETTER
DECISIONS
“HOW DO WE
SOLVE THIS?”
BECOMES
“WOW, WHAT
ELSE CAN WE
DO?”
BETTER
DEVELOPMENT
INVENT YOUR
PRODUCT, NOT
A GRAPH
DATABASE

50. Thank you!!!
@davefauth
david.fauth@neotechnology.com