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rvanbruggen / Instructions.md
Last active November 17, 2022 11:30
Nodes2022 schedule graph

How to import/access the Nodes2022 schedule in Neo4j

Very simple

  1. Access this Aura Free database and use u/p Neo4j/changeme
  2. Go to Neodash, and point it at neo4j+s://2aba193f.databases.neo4j.io, with the above credentials - and load a dashboard from the database
  3. grab the NODES2022-Perspective.json and add that to your Bloom perspectives, and start exploring!

You can also:

@rvanbruggen
rvanbruggen / betterworldcupgraph.md
Last active November 15, 2022 15:28
WorldCup2022 in Qatar

A 2nd, better way to WorldCupGraph

Hours after publishing my previous blogpost about the WorldCup Graph, I actually found a better, and more up to date dataset that contained all the data of the actual squads that are going to play in the actual World Cup in Qatar. I found it on this wikipedia page, which lists all the tables with the actual squads, some player details, coaches etc. as they were announced on 10th/11th of November.

So: I figured it would be nice to revisit the WorldcupGraph, and show a simpler and faster way to achieve the results of the previous exercise. So: I have actually put this data in this spreadsheet, and then downloaded a .csv version:

@rvanbruggen
rvanbruggen / dadjoke_guide.mdx
Last active October 20, 2022 13:04
A Graph Database and a Dadjoke walk into a bar...

Part 1/6: Building a Dadjoke database - from nothing

All the Dadjokes are in this Twitter list. It's a very funny list.

Interesting to work directly with the Twitter API if you want to:

@rvanbruggen
rvanbruggen / 1-hadithgraph.md
Last active November 23, 2024 22:59
Hadith Narrator Graph

Graphs are everywhere - also in Religious Texts

This is going to be an interesting and in some ways even fascinating blogpost. I have thoroughly enjoyed researching it and playing around with the latest and greates Neo4j tools while doing so, but I must say that it's also one of the first blogposts that I can remember where I am a bit uneasy about the content. Why? Because it's about, or at least in some ways touches, religion.

First let's start with some background here. Some things that you should know about me:

  • I was born and raised in Belgium, which is - or at least was - a predominantly Catholic Christian country. There's churches and chapels on every corner of the street here.
  • My parents were/are far from religious, never took me to church, but did give me many of the Catholic Christian values - and these were engrained in me even more clearly because of my 13 ears in Jesuit schools in Antwerp and Turnhout.
  • as an adult, I became increasingly distantiated from all rel
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rvanbruggen / 1-cognitivebias.mdx
Last active January 3, 2022 12:00
Cognitive Biases in Neo4j

Cognitive biases in Neo4j

I am an economist/engineer. I studied "Commercial Engineering" in Belgium in the nineties, and was quite an avid learner of economic theories large and small at the time. I did however, always kind of find myself uneasy at economists insistence on the rationality the homo economicus, as I knew, and observed all around me, that people were far from rational. That's why, ever since I learned of its existence, I have been a big fan of the field of behavioral economics - which actually tries to formulate ecomic theories that are real, and often times, irrational. I fondly remember first reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, and learning about some of the crazy biases that he observed and DESCribed. And Nobel-prize-winning Daniel Kahneman has been a hero for decades. I think about the Framing Effect and

@rvanbruggen
rvanbruggen / transactionbatching.mdx
Created December 6, 2021 20:12
Transaction batching in neo4j 4.4

Revisiting contact tracing with Neo4j 4.4's transaction batching capabilities

Yes! It's been a few months, but Saint Nicholas just brought us a brand new and shiny release of Neo4j 4.4 to play with. One of the key features is a generic transaction batching capability, similar to what we have been using in apoc.periodic.iterate but now built right into the core of the database. It is referred to as the CALL in Transaction capability - and of course it is a really interesting feature.

So in this article I will be revisiting this blogpost, but without the nee

Exploring the Congo Holdup articles with Neo4j

As you may know, I am from Belgium. I love this little queer country, with all of its idiosyncracies and weirdness it still makes for a great place to live. Did I mention Beer, Waffles and Chocolate yet? Yes, that's why.

But in the 191 years that we have existed as a country, we have done some weird sh!t as well. As an example, we did some of the craziest stuff ever under our former King Leopold II. I got to know a bit more about that through Klara, a (Dutch spoken, but nevertheless crazy wonderful) Flemish radio station, which hosted a podcast about Leopold II's crazy, and sometimes cruel, adventures in Congo. See over here if you are interested. It's a terrible, but fascinating story.

So more recently, when I started reading about the Congo Holdup in [De Standaa

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rvanbruggen / Pandora_Papers_neo4jguide.mdx
Last active November 10, 2021 21:55
Pandora Papers - the Power Players

The Pandora Papers Guide

Graphic courtesy of ICIJ

Background

The Pandora Papers have rocked the world. News organisations began publishing their explosive contents on October 3, the giant leak has dominated headlines and posed questions of some of the world’s most powerful people and their financial propriety.

Some highlights:

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rvanbruggen / 1-rebeergraph.mdx
Last active October 5, 2021 20:12
Re-Importing the Belgian Beergraph into Neo4j with apoc.load.html

ReBeerGraph: importing the Belgian BeerGraph straight from a Wikipedia HTML page

I have written about beer a few times, also on this blog. I have figured out a variety of ways to import The Wikipedia Page with all the belgian beers into Neo4j over the years. Starting with a spreadsheet based approach, then importing it from a Google Sheet (with it's great automated .csv export facilities), and then building on that functionality to automatically import the Wikipedia page into a spreadsheet using some funky IMPORTHTML() functions in Google sheets.

But: all of the above have started to crumble recently. The Wikipedia page, is actually kind of a difficult thing to parse automatically, as it splits up the dataset into many different HTML tables (which makes me need to import multiple datasets, really), and then it also seems like Wikipedia has added an additional column to it's data (the "Timeframe" o

Revisiting contact tracing with Neo4j 4.3's relationship indexes

New release of Neo4j 4.3 came out. One of the key features are relationship property indexes - a really interesting feature.

Two main points of attention:

  1. Performance improvements: all of a sudden the Neo4j Cypher query planner is going to be able to use a lot more information, provided by these relationship indexes. The planner is becoming smarter - and therefore queries will become faster. We will explore this below.
  2. Modelling implications: the introduction of these indexes will have far-reaching implications with regards to how we model certain things. More options are good, of course!