What’s new, and what’s next? Product innovation moves rapidly at Neo4j – learn how graph technology can provide you with the tools to get much more from your data!
At the heart -- Neo4j Graph Database
Development tools for transactional use cases and applications
Data Science workbench for analytics and ML workloads
Built in data visualization
Languages and APIs
Connectors to move data in and out, streaming or bulk
Optimised infrastructure environment
All of this designed to run anywhere -- desktop, on-premises, hybrid or public cloud, available as a cloud service
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At the heart of our platform, of course is our native graph database on which serves as the foundation of all the capabilities
tools for discovery and visualization and code free/low code tooling (for devs and data scientists)
data visualization tools helped executives understand intricacies within supply chains (inc covd vaccine distribution)
Plug and play with on machine learning frameworks: Sage maker or Vertex AI an other toolkits like tensor flow, etc.
Neo4j is Google’s graph database partner and GV is an investor in Neo4j
Friction-free graph data science - more time experimenting, discovering value, less time wrangling data.
Cypher, openCypher, GQL. Neo4j is the leader in graph query languages and maintains that leadership in driving standards for the industry.
GQL is the same people as SQL - this is a big deal!
Ensures value in learning is maintained, simplifies systems.
Tools and connectors, kafka, JDBC, snowflake, data warehouses, etc
Development tools and frameworks so you can use the platform productively, natively in your chosen environment
Drivers for all languages
OGMs for Spring, Java, Python, etc
[intro slide for the next set of slides]
The platform is built on some key technology innovations that make us unique in the industry. We’re going to talk about each capability in the following slides
Native graph storage means there is no mismatch between the business domain and the data model as it is stored. What you see on the white board is what you get.
Data is stored in an ACID compliant way, making us fit as a primary transactional database because we ensure there is no data is consistent and without loss
The flexibility of the schema allows you to expand the data model as business requirements evolve.
Native graph processing means lightning fast retrieval of data due to our ability to traverse nodes and relationships. We are continuing to improve our significant performance advantage over relational databases. For example, the recent version 5 has enhanced multiple hop queries to be even faster than what we had in version 4.
Version 5 also saw significant improvements in the ability to scale out. The millisecond performance response time, and the ACID compliant data integrity are maintained as we allow you to scale out elastically across clusters using Autonomous Clustering, one of the most advanced clustering architectures of any database. You can also take advantage sharding to deal with very large data sets more efficiently, and use Fabric to treat the entire data set as if they belonged to a single graph.
“Wave-particle duality” analogy
Can be used for transactions AND analytics
If you develop your modern applications on Neo4j, you will reap the benefits multiple times down the road.
You have only 1 database, not 2 separate databases with the headache associated with ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading)
Only 1 data model to deal with. Unlike in relational or other NoSQL when you have 1 DB for operational and another for complex queries
Ne4j graph database is at the heart of our our product, graph data science.
It allows you to run powerful, in-memory analytics with unparalleled performance and scope
We also provide a pipeline to supervised AI/ML models, enriching data used for AI and making predictions
[for full story, stay tuned for Graph Data Science section]
The following three have been consolidated into the Workspace (for AuraDB):
Neo4j Data Importer allows you to import your data for modeling purposes. And quickly test your data model against real data before you start developing.
Neo4j Browser is a developer-focused tool to write Cypher queries and explore your Neo4j graph database. It’s a great way to learn about Neo4j and Cypher and review results in both illustrative and tabular form – all from within your browser.
Neo4j Bloom is our graph data visualization tool that works out of the box with your Neo4j database. Developers, Data Scientists, and Data Analysts can explore nodes, relationships, and graph patterns with a natural type-to-search interface. Bloom also helps to boost cross-team collaboration with codeless search-to-story design so that anyone can run simple pre-canned queries without having to learn Cypher and most recently, we’ve recently integrated our Graph Data Science library with Bloom available now in AuraDS
– other tools
With Neo4j Desktop, develop apps with your favorite programming language like GraphQL, Node.js, Python, Go, Java, .Net, PHP and more. Connect and query remote Neo4j databases anywhere: On-prem, Self-hosted on any cloud, fully managed via Neo4j Aura and create unlimited local databases in a project based workspace
And lastly, Neo4j GraphQL Library — an official library for building GraphQL APIs that bring the power of graphs to GraphQL. The low-code aspect of the library enables developers to use their GraphQL expertise to rapidly prototype building applications without the need to first learn Cypher or code Cypher into the front-end of the application. It’s open source and we’re getting awesome contributions from the developer community.
Neo4j Ops Manager allows admins to manage all self-managed Neo4j databases, instances, and clusters; and monitor them from a single UI based console.
Additional Notes (If time allows)
Desktop
* Gives you a single user development license for Neo4j Enterprise in an easy to manage single installation - no need to manage Java or neo4j installs yourself.
* Organise your different Neo4j installations / versions for different projects
* Provides tooling to make your development experience easier, including easier access to logs, configuration files, filesystem and plugin management
* Gives you easy access to Neo4j's latest releases of Browser and Bloom as well as third party graph applications
* Primarily intended for local development, but also allows you to connect to remote instances
Browser
* The best place to author Cypher queries and inspect query returns
* Assistance writing queries provides autocompletion of labels, rel types and properties
* Visualise your query returns in the most appropriate way - either as tabular results or as a graph
* Inspect query plans and profile queries to understand how they can be optimised
* A great place to test parameterising of your queries
* Gain insights into high level database information (label and rel type counts) and review running queries.
* Learn about the graph database and Cypher query language via interactive guided content
Spend 10 seconds on this slide. Say we are always up to date on the latest compliance and security measures. Most recently we got SOC2 Type 2 certified.
TLS 1.2/1.3, with encrypted bucket storage
Okta, Active Directory, Google *& Others
AWS PrivateLinkPrivate Service Connect GCP -
Node, Edge, and Traversal Level Granularity
Cyber Academy Code Scanning & Pentesting
CCPA
GDPR
ISO 27001
Soc 2 Type 1
And more recently Type 2
Available as a fully managed cloud database service in addition to self managed. On the cloud of your choice, or on your premises.
Completely automatic provisioning, upgrades and patches
Scale on demand, with just a click
Highly available
Secure and reliable
Simple consumption based pricing
AuraDB has a free tier you can get started with now!
THEME / Our vision.
First DB means first choice DB, ie, Neo4j is among the leading databases developers and architects think of when developing any application, not just your traditional use cases.
Primary DB means Neo4j is the system of record, not just a secondary db for fast queries. And by using Neo4j as the primary DB, you get dividends down the road such as the ability to execute fast complex queries, perform analytics, and complement AI/ML systems.
Dev experience
In order to promote Neo4j as the first choice database among developers, there are enhancements that we need to develop in order to make our vision a reality.
Developers want to develop and operate from / in the cloud. To that end we are making AuraDB available in Azure in addition to GCP and AWS
Neo4j engineers constitute the vast majority of contributors to GQL, the open source standard that is emerging as the equivalent of SQL for graph. This will promote adoption of GQL and graph technology, and Neo4j!
Developers are interested in how Neo4j improves their productivity or capability. For example, we could pluck out "graph element types" from the GQL standard and describe how that enables composable schema -- the data equivalent of reusable software components, an evergreen DX theme.
Developers love APIs. We are working on database management APIs for AuraDB.
Performance at Scale
In order to ensure architects and developers feel comfortable about adopting Neo4j as the primary DB, there are a few important things we are working on:
CDC supports Neo4j as the primary DB, since it allows developers to extract data out of Neo4j to the target systems for other purposes.This is a feature asked by major customers like Tesla, for example.
Parallel Cypher Queries solidifies our positioning as being very fast not only for transactional application data, but also for users performing analytical queries (before you even use Data Science). By using Neo4j as a primary DB, you get free analytical capabilities that you otherwise would not get if you used a relational database.
We also want to keep the cost of using Neo4j in the cloud reasonable for you, and frankly for us. That is what the Freki project is for.
Declarative server management is the ability to tag servers with labels, which you can use to declare certain autonomous clustering rules are applicable to those servers labeled a certain way. Even easier scale-out with Autonomous Clustering
Operations
And if Neo4j is going to be the primary database, we need to ensure its operations are even more solid than it already is:
For self managed Neo4j, the Ops Manager is being enhanced with a query analyzer so you can better understand your queries and fine tune them
With log and metrics streaming we’re providing you a better way to integrate Neo4j monitoring to your existing observability infrastructure
Finally, for AuraDB, we are providing a couple enhancements that allow you to more easily self manage certain security aspects.
Graph Structures Improve Data Science outcomes. This is because information that is traditionally trapped in rows and columns can be easily uncovered in a graph. This is especially true for use cases that focus on prioritization, anomaly and fraud detection, and predictions because of the connected nature of the use cases. So when data science, teams are looking to answer the questions of what's important, what's unusual and what's coming next, choosing a graph structure can improve their outcomes. We see these three big questions across departments and industries - whether it is financial services firms trying to identify fraud, customer service looking for the most important support article, , people teams looking to recommend training and upskilling, or retailers looking to recommend products - graph structure strengthens the analysis for all of these - and other use cases.
Additional Notes:
What’s Important? Prioritization
Listen for words like:
Best
Top performing
Highest converting
Most challenging
What’s Unusual? Anomaly and Fraud Detection
Listen for words around behavior like:
Unusual
Anomalous
Strange
Odd
Weird
What’s next? Predictions
Listen for words like:
Recommend
Optimize
Improve
Likely
Graph Data Science Simplifies and Optimizes Data Science workflows by eliminating a lot of the tedious work as well as providing improvements in model accuracy and performance.
So the graph structure lends itself to use cases where relationships matter - and Neo4j Graph Data Science further improves the outcomes and simplifies the process. Because the data is no longer stuck in rows and columns, uncovering the hidden relationships becomes much easier and the analysis is much better. To start with, let’s talk about how we simplify the work the data science teams have to do: it eliminates a massive amount of arduous complexity that a data scientist would have to go through to answer those types of questions in a traditional shape. It eliminates the complex joins. And mining multiple tables. The tedious manual approximations the brute force comparisons and managing with fractured data.
In addition to making it easier, graph data science, also improves the outcomes of the analysis. We're seeing a 95% reduction in computation time. And we find that this is a 500 times faster approach than using open source libraries.
Not only that, but the outcomes are better - 20 to 30 percent improvement in model performance. In specific use cases, our customers are seeing things like a 600% improvement in traffic, to their sites. Five million dollars of additional fraud detection and three times better churn predictability using graph data science. So not only does neo4j graph data science, make it incredibly easy to do this work, it also makes the outcomes of the work better.
600% improvement in traffic = Meredith corp via customer 360/entity resolution
$5m fraud = Large TelCo in APAC
3x better churn predictability = Large TelCo in APAC
5x reduction in factory production lead time = global pharmaceutical company
The only graph data science solution built for data scientists to improve predictions and ML models, at scale, with seamless integration across the data stack to get more data science projects to production.
Neo4j Graph Data Science provides full ML Pipeline support - both supervised and unsupervised. This coverage makes it seamless for data scientists to use Graph Data Science as they would with traditional data science tools - even bringing graph features into external ML pipelines through embeddings.
Oftentimes the work of data scientists are ignored or underestimated because the business stakeholders don’t believe the analysis over historic norms or gut feel. Graph also allows the business stakeholders to see how relationships are formed and why how the outcomes are formed. The visual cues provided by a graph help drive adoption.
Graph Data Science is when you leverage relationships between data points for analytics and ML - not just the features from the data points themselves as is the case with traditional Data Science. Hidden relationships and patterns emerge when data is analyzed in a connected structure - allowing for new insights that help better answer some of today’s most pressing questions.
Use graph analytics/algos - - centrality, similarity, etc.
But also use graph features to enhance existing ML models
Then go full stack for graph machine learning models.
Queries: find the patterns you know exist.
Machine Learning: feature engineering, and predictions. - graph algorithms,
Visualization: explore, collaborate, and explain.
As with all financial institutions - and actually most institutions - Banking Circle was hoping to improve its ability to identify fraud across transactions. Using algos like centrality, community detection, and similarity, Banking Circle was able to increase their fraud detection by 300% - for other customers of ours, they find fraud in the millions of dollars using these techniques, they were also able to improve true positive escalations, reducing false positive escalations - that means they were better able to predict what was true fraud and what wasn’t. These improved flows and checks led to a 150% increase in payment flow so customers weren’t slowed down by escalations and investigations.