The art of simplicity

Quick tip for you today if you are looking for a tool to help you draw your graph models. Have a look at arrows.app . Arrows.app is a free tool created by the Neo4j team offering the following features: Quick Intuitive drawing with a mouse. Neo4j Property Graph Model Draw: nodes, relationships, properties, labels. Fine-grained Styling Control: sizes, layouts, colors. Export as image or Cypher Use images in documents or presentations. Run Cypher to create graphs in Neo4j. I especially like the last feature as it makes it very easy to translate your model to a real graph in Neo4j: To learn more about the tool, check out the following Youtube video:

I got a question from one of my teams last week on how to apply versioning in Graph databases. There are multiple ways to tackle this problem but let me share the way I typically handle this. What do you mean with ‘versioning’? Let me start by explaining what I mean exactly with ‘versioning’.  Our data changes over time. Without versioning we only now the current state of our data but not what happened in the past. By applying versioning techniques, we can keep track of changes both on the data and its dependencies. This can be useful for auditing purposes but there are a lot more reasons why this can be applied. There are multiple types of versioning but the question I got was related to time-based versioning. The idea with time-based versioning is that you can track changes over time. We end up with an append-only model where we are able to step through time to understand the state changes. How to model time-based versioning in graph databases? The core idea with time-b...