Dave & Ted’s Excellent Traversal Adventure: Graph Databases & Gremlin Part 2

Editor: Josh, You were at GraphDay SF a couple of weeks ago, and you are doing an online Gremlin training pretty soon. How about writing up a little blog post talking about those things? Great, we can continue Dave & Ted’s excellent adventures! No. I don’t think you heard me. I just want a little report with high SEO value. Oh, I heard you. I just didn’t listen. That idea sounds boring. I want to do another Dave & Ted. Everybody loves Dave & Ted. (The Editor considers the holiday and that Ashley from marketing will raise holy hell if he doesn’t have something fast.) OK, you can do one more Dave & Ted, but just one. And make sure Google can find it!

It is Monday morning after GraphDay SF and Dave stumbles back into the corporate office somewhere well East of San Francisco. Ted, however, is on his second pour-over, still basking in the wonder of the West Coast GraphDay weekend.

Ted: Good morning, Dave! Saw you at GraphDay. What’d you think?

Dave: (Wincing at Ted’s ebullience.) I think it is too early for that much cheer. Yeah, GraphDay good, really good. Great technical content from all around. I need to look into this GraphQL some more after seeing how easy it is to hook up Neo4j to it. Microsoft’s CosmosDB is very ambitious; I’m looking forward see how it develops. I’ve run ElasticSearch with other databases and the fact that DSE has Graph & Search with Apache Solr in one engine sounds really appealing, from an operations point of view.

Ted: What about all of the JanusGraph talks?

Dave: (Still a little bleary from a red eye flight.) The Jango Fett lox? What do Star Wars and salmon have to do with GraphDay?

Ted: I said, “Janus. Graph. Talks.”

Dave: Oh, yeah, JanusGraph. The OSS graph engine. I caught a few of those as well. That Wilmes cat is out there, though he had some really interesting ideas of where graph engines could go. But he wasn’t as out there as that Marko fellow that did the keynote. I wasn’t sure if Marko was spending too much time hanging out with nuclear physicists in Los Alamos, or he was trolling someone.

Ted. Probably both.

Dave: Figured. Never trust a guy that owns an ascot, much less has a picture of himself wearing one on his personal site.

Ted: Um, ok. So, yeah, JanusGraph did have quite a show. Everyone was talking about it: GRAK.AI, IBM, Expero, Ten-X.

Dave: I’d put Janus as second to Expero for best in conference.

Ted: Expero? Oh yeah, the company Wilmes works for.

Dave: And Chris Pounds, who manned up and did a live demo. I mean, I’m a risk taker, but I ain’t crazy enough to do that at a conference. Perryman’s training was good (I’ll never forget that the Gremlin console auto-iterates for you), and he and Jeremy Hanna covered some interesting ancestry use cases.

Ted: But Expero as best in show? What about that Comcast talk on scaling strategies with DSE Graph? It was late in the day, but man, what great content. Or Dr. Denise Gosnell’s talk?

Dave: Sure, all were good talks. Great technical content for a really technical crowd. I mean, is 15ms response time fast or slow? But in the end conference performance is all about the swag, and Expero had the best with their “Graph is the New Bacon” T-shirts.

Ted: Depends on the SLAs.

Dave: What?

Ted: If 15ms is fast or slow? It depends on the SLAs.

Dave: Right. In our day jobs. But at a conference it doesn’t matter. What matters is the swag, and not only do those Expero shirts look good, but they fit great and man are they soft. But I’ve got more pressing problems to deal with.

Ted: Like what?

Dave: I’ve got a team of developers that needs to get started with Gremlin ASAP. Waiting for Perryman’s next training in Seattle is a no-go, not to mention that I don’t have the travel budget to take 5 staff across the country for the next Intro to Gremlin training.

Ted: Why don’t you take it online?

Dave: Expero can’t offer online training. They are a boutique software design and development shop.

Ted: But they do!

Dave: They do?

Ted: Yes, in just a couple of weeks: Introduction to Apache TinkerPop & Gremlin Query Language on July 21, from 10am to 2pm CDT, actually.

Dave: Wow, kid. That just might be the ticket I need. I thought I was going to have to write it myself. It isn’t like there’s an O’Reilly TinkerPop Gremlin book, or a Gremlin in 24 Hours book.

Ted: I think I heard Marko’s going to write a book.

Dave: If Marko wrote it, it would probably be some fictional narrative using his TinkerPop characters like Gremlin, Rexster and Pipes to discuss and illustrate the finer points of graph theory. And he’d write it while he sailed with his partner from Miami to Alaska by way of the Pacific rim. And then he’d go back to New Mexico and do TinkerPop 4 with Akka and Graph Actors, implementing the core graph engine as a virtual machine.

Ted: OMG. That would be AWESOME!!!!!

Dave: Fanboi much?

Ted: (Still basking in the wonder of Graph Actors and virtual machines) What? (Composing himself) Do you think I could get Marko to sign my copy of his book?

Dave: Sure, there’s only going to be a dozen sold. It will be the first book to skip the first run and go straight to Dover reprint. But leaving graph fantasy land behind, I’m going to go to Expero’s site and register for some online training.

So, Mr. Disembodied-editor-dude, how’s that look?

(Editor glances over his shoulder at Ashley from Marketing who’s glaring at him and tapping her foot impatiently, wanting to publish now.) Well, um, you did recap parts of GraphDay SF. And you got in the bit about the online Gremlin training coming up. So… I guess we can run with this. Not like I have many options. Are you sure you can say all of this speculative nonsense about Marko?

Awesome! And Marko just emailed me: Actually, he wants it to go directly to Penguin Classics. Black bottom cover with some 18th-century painting of cavalry, canons, and muskets going at it. I guess nothing says graph theory like young men wasting their potential and enacting carnage as envisioned by an 18th-century Realist.

OK. Let’s publish it.