Julian's Polymath Explorations

So, you have an itch to test-drive Neo4j and its Cypher query language.  Maybe you want to learn it, or evaluate it, or introduce colleagues/clients to it.  And you wish for: fast, simple and free! Well, good news: the Neo4j company kindly provides a free, short-term hosted solution called "the Neo4j sandbox" .  Extremely easy to set up and use! This article is part 2 of a growing, ongoing series on Graph Databases and Neo4j Register (free) for the Neo4j "Sandbox" Go to sandbox.neo4j.com , and register with a working email and a password.  That's it! Note that this same email/password will also let you into the Neo4j Community Forums and Support ; the same login for all: very convenient! Launch your instance - blank or pre-populated After registering, go to  sandbox.neo4j.com  , and follow the steps in the diagram below (the choices might differ, but the "Blank Sandbox" should always be there): Too good to be true?  Is there...

You might recall, around the year 2000, a Grand Breakthrough in biology: the complete sequencing of human DNA.   People hoped that proteins would be next.  But now, about 20 years later, we're not at that level of understanding when it comes to PROTEINS rather than DNA...  Why? Because proteins are devilishly complex . If you're managing a database (relational or semantic) featuring proteins, you might think that the entities (records) of your database are simply "proteins", and that you're just going to need a number of fields (attributes) to describe those records...  Right?  Wrong! A little basic biology brush-up for starters...  Recall that DNA is a sequence of 4 "letters" ( nucleotides .)  Proteins are sequences of 20 "letters" (amino acids. )  So, why the immense complexity of proteins? There are 20 200  possible amino-acid sequences for a 200-residue protein, of which the natural evolutionary process has sampled only an in...