Combining Neo4j with Kafka

David Allen shows how you can use Neo4j to visualize graphic data living in Kafka:

We’re enabling the plugin to work as both a source and a sink. In the NEO4J_streams_sink_topic_cypher_friends item, we’re writing a Cypher query. In this query, we’re MERGE-ing two Person nodes. The plugin gives us a variable named event, which we can use to pull out the properties we need. When we MERGE nodes, it creates them only if they do not already exist. Finally, it creates a relationship between the two nodes (p1) and (p2).

This sink configuration is how we’ll turn a stream of records from Kafka into an ever-growing and changing graph. The rest of the configuration handles our connection to a Confluent Cloud instance, where all of our event streaming will be managed for us. If you’re trying this out for yourself, make sure to replace KAFKA_BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS, API_SECRET, and API_KEY with the values that Confluent Cloud gives you when you generate an API access key.

Click through for the example.