Using the Neo4J Graph Database to Build a High Performance Social Network

This workshop will show you how to build a high-performance backend for a social network based on the open source Neo4j graph database. A graph database uses nodes, relationships between nodes and key-value properties instead of tables to represent information. This data model is ideal for storing social network data and can frequently outperform a relational database by a factor of 1000x or more.

We will over the course of this workshop give you a real-world introduction to how you can write a web 2.0 app on top of the transactional, disk-based and highly scalable Neo4j open source graph database. We will investigate the implementation of a small but working social network backend, with simple but powerful APIs to find paths between people, identify friends in different levels and to analyze the social graph for suggested new friends. This will be done using simple code examples and the full implementation will be available as open source after the workshop.

What you will get from this workshop:

• A practical introduction to graph databases.
• A code-oriented example of how to implement a social network backend on top of a graph database.
• Benchmarks of graph databases vs RDBMS for social network data.