Come join us for west side edition of the Elastic Los Angeles User Group at Demand Media in Santa Monica.  All skill-levels are welcome!

Agenda:

7:00 PM- 7:30 PM: Food, drinks, mingling

7:30 PM – 7:45 PM: Upcoming meeting(s), Call for presenters (or venues), Member Introductions

7:45 PM – 8:00 PM: Lightning Talks (Up to 3)

8:00 PM – 8:45 PM:  Benjamin Nussbaum - Technology Entrepreneur, Software Architect

8:45 PM – 9:00 PM:  Wrap Up Q&A

Talk Abstract:
Complimentary technologies are very important as it becomes it's rarely possible for a single technology to be optimized for everything. There are always trade-offs - jack of all trades master of none also applies in technology solutions. In this increasingly polyglot world of data storage options one natural pairing that has proven quite effective is Neo4j and ElasticSearch. Neo4j is designed for optimal graph traversal (i.e querying highly connected data) and ElasticSearch is a powerful search server with great language analyzers and aggregation strategies out of the box. While you could try to rebuild the search capabilities in Neo4j because it's built on Lucene, you'd be relaying much of the foundation you already have in ElasticSearch with a subpar result and similarly while you could try to represent connected graph structures in ElasticSearch you'd be expending much effort with short comings in reliability due to the underlying storage mechanisms compared to using Neo4j for that connected data aspect. In this talk we'll look at paring them together and reaping the benefits of both doing what their best at. Here is a high level summary blog post I published a couple weeks ago https://www.graphgrid.com/pairing-neo4j-elasticsearch-the-basics/ and we'll go into more technical detail about the integration.

Speaker Bio:
Benjamin Nussbaum brings to the table nearly 20 years of software architecture and engineering, server infrastructure, database design and technology innovation experience with implementation expertise in globally distributed enterprise software solutions for the F2000.

Benjamin has experienced first hand the incredible business value that is gained by an enterprise when they focus on connected data and leverage the relationships in their data for understanding and insight. The last 4 years Benjamin has been focused on helping organizations get their data out of the individual databases and data lakes scattered across departments and into a connect state using the Neo4j graph database where the data can be leveraged holistically as a valuable business asset.