AmsterdamPHP Monthly Meeting - July 2014
17 Jul 2014 at True

Knowing that this was Michelle first talk about this issue, it was an excellent starting point!
Her positioning in the room was good (everyone could see her and the screen clearly), the slides were clear, she talked loud and clear, live demoing was an excellent idea, simple and effective. Also loved the occasional funny "Yeeey!", which is an excellent practise when making presentations, both to create empathy with the audience and to help ppl regain focus on the presentation.
Things to improve:

- The audience will always have concerns about stability and performance. There should be something mentioned in the beginning about:
- Who uses GraphDBs/Neo4J
- Who develops it and why its gonna be around for many years
- How fast is it to develop with it, when compared to RDBMS, where you have to plan the whole DB design in advance, in detail
- How fast is it when compared to MySQL. It would be good to have a few different benchmarks, but it would be excellent if you would have your own benchmark.

- It's easier for ppl to connect with a new concept if they can relate it to something they already know. I would suggest that in the beginning of the talk you clearly relate RDBMS with GraphDB, by relating a table to a node type, a record to a node, and explaining that while in RDBMS relations are pre-established between tables/nodetypes, in GraphDBs relations are not pre-established, they are created on the fly and directly between records/nodes.

- In the end it would be great to have a more complex example of a situation that is possible/easy to do with GraphDBs but impossible/difficult to do with RDBMS.

Hope this helps improve the talk, but as I said before, it was a very good talk already.

Great talk, best intro to graph databases I've seen! Really great use case format and nice slides.

The only downside was really the crowd, a lot of questions and private conversations really distracted from the talk.

Great talk. Had no experience with graph databases whatsoever and could understand the concept perfectly thanks to Michelle!

Great talk! I also very much liked the live demo. Looking forward to OmnomHub!

Good talk! I was very interested in this intro into Neo4J and the talk gave me a broad overview of what to expect when working with graph databases.

Looking forward to seeing it more in action (via OmnomHub and finally seeing all the strangers recipes ;))

I would also kindly suggest trying to move the questions to designated timeframes (or something) in order to keep the crowd from going into various discussions.. (it got pretty rowdy in the back of the room and took a while before it quieted down...)

All in all: great subject, good talk and live demo FTW!

Awesome talk, such database, much nodes, wow

Great talk from Michelle, I was curious about Graph Databases and she made a great job on showing what we can do with Neo4j. I really enjoyed the presentation, good clean slides and live demo is always a plus! Looking forward to OmnomHub too!