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Ian Robinson, Author of "REST in Practice", Neo Technology

Ian Robinson

Biography: Ian Robinson

Ian Robinson is Director of Customer Success for Neo Technology, the company behind Neo4j, the popular open source graph database. He is a co-author of 'REST in Practice' (O'Reilly) and a contributor to 'REST: From Research to Practice' (Springer) and 'Service Design Patterns' (Addison-Wesley). He presents at conferences worldwide on topics including RESTful enterprise integration and the use of graph database technologies, and blogs at IanSRobinson.com.

Twitter: @iansrobinson
Video presentations: The Counterintuitive Web, RESTful Enterprise Development, Beginning an SOA Initiative

Presentation: Moderated NoSQL Panel

Track: NoSQL Solutions Track / Time: Wednesday 10:20 - 11:10 / Location: Westminster Suite

Training: Neo4j Tutorial

Track: Training / Time: Monday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Henry Moore

Graph databases like Neo4j are a powerful member of the NOSQL family. For highly connected data, Neo4j can be thousands of times faster than relational databases, making it popular for managing complex data across many domains from finance to social, and telecoms to geospatial.

This hands-on workshop covers the core functionality from the Neo4j graph database, providing a mixture of theory and accompanying practical sessions to demonstrate the capabilities of graph data and the Neo4j database. Specifically attendees will learn about:

  • NoSQL and Graph Database overview
  • Neo4j Fundamentals and Architecture
  • The Neo4j Core API
  • Indexing
  • Neo4j Traverser APIs
  • Declarative querying with Cypher
  • Solutions architecture

Each session (apart from the fundamentals and architecture) will be a mixture of a small amount of theory combined with a set of practical exercises designed to reinforce how to achieve sophisticated goals with Neo4j. The practical parts of the tutorial consist of Koan-style lessons where a specific aspect of the Neo4j stack is presented as a set of failing unit tests which attendees will fix, gradually becoming more challenging until the attendees are capable of implementing sophisticated graph operations against Neo4j.

Attendees won't need any previous experience with Neo4j or NOSQL databases, but will require some fluency in Java, a little familiarity with a modern IDE, and a basic understanding of JUnit to help complete the lab tasks.