Although it was organized and sponsored by Neo4j, it was not a Neo4j trade show. Instead, there were a number of general talks about graph databases and social network analysis. (However, if you wanted Neo4j centric-talks, they were provided too.) Now that some of the slides and videos are up on the site, I can link to a few highlights:
- The Power of the Social Graph by James Fowler. Author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives gave an amazing overview of social network analysis. What was so refreshing, however, is that he had conducted actual experiments, A/B tests and the like and not just post hoc analyses.
- Data Modeling with Graphs – Peter Bell, Graph Database Evangelist by Peter Bell. Thinking in graphs in really quite different from thinking about relational databases and requires a different mindset for data modeling.
- Graph Processing at Twitter by Pankaj Gupta. It is really quite humbling to think through the largest datasets I have worked with (single digit terabytes) and the magnitude of data that Twitter handles every single day. He gave a really interesting overview of the different data sources, uses, approaches and technologies used at Twitter.
It is a little unfair to single out just those three as I enjoyed the whole day. The food was great too and as I had attended DataWeek (which was a tiresome tradeshow), I got a discount code that got me into GraphConnect for only $100. No complaints here.
