ArangoDB Blog

I'm currently working on a sort of mind mapping system at the moment, with the idea that I can use it as a sort of personal database.

I'm using ArangoDB (https://www.arangodb.com/) to store ideas as collections of nodes, where the properties and details of those ideas (or objects) can be connected to eachother. The properties can be simple descriptions of the node, or documents such as html, pdf, or images.

Im doing this because my memory is terrible (ADHD), and I want to make a system that lets me take notes and record ideas in a way thats more... organic in the way that I think about things. I also tend to use a lot of documentation from the web, and have no way of sorting it other than through bookmarks. Being able to pull webpages off of the internet and reference them within notes is a powerful tool, I have found.

I'm excited for the project for a lot of reasons, but what excites me the most is what I can do once I have this personal database filled out enough. I will essentially have a graph based model of what is typically floating around my head, like a network of thoughts, interconnected by both objective and subjective properties. I aim to use this database to build a sort of personal assistant, personalized for the user.

I think that this is something that we are kind of missing today, where a lot of our interactions come from the internet, this ephemeral space where you can't exactly organize everything that you see and interact with.
As an example, imagine…

Personally my favorite db for pet projects is

https://www.arangodb.com/

I think you hear very little about it because ADB users see it as a "secret weapon" to crush their competitors with. I've done large ontology work (MESH and other health ontologies) and IoT work (keep several years of sensor readings for sensors in my house) and workflow systems (select interesting HN articles or jobs I want to apply to) and it has never let me down. I haven't run a real instance serving customers in the cloud though.

For the last few years every eng manager I have worked with has been a fan of

https://www.postgresql.org/

In the early 2000s I thought it overpromised and underdelivered and called it CrashGreSlow but after MySQL got bought by Oracle the pgsql team has worked hard to improve it I think it is great today. It supports all kinds of advanced features such as stored procs, full-text search, JSON equivalent fields, etc.

ArangoDB | Multiple Positions |Full-Time| Cologne, Germany and REMOTE

ArangoDB is the leading native multi-model NoSQL database, with more than 5 million downloads. It combines the power of graphs, with JSON documents and a key-value store. ArangoDB makes all of your data models accessible with a single declarative query language. Developers can build high-performance applications using a convenient SQL-like query language or JavaScript extensions. Oh, and did we mention it is open source?

- Senior C/C++ Engineer | Europe, remote| http://bit.ly/2UH5Qaq

- Java Developer, to maintain and develop the ArangoDB Spring Data Integration | Europe, remote | http://bit.ly/2RB2Vhq

- JavaScript Fullstack Developer, to maintain and develop the ArangoDB JavaScript framework Foxx | Europe, remote

Any questions?
Website: https://www.arangodb.com/
Contact: gudrun@arangodb.com or https://careers.arangodb.com/

We first adopted Jasmine for our internal JavaScript tests in ArangoDB (https://www.arangodb.com) to replace the ancient and inconvenient framework we were using before. It worked, kinda, but it was a mess. We still needed something to expose to developers wishing to test their own apps in the DB and doing that with Jasmine proved to be pretty much impossible.

It was extremely straightforward to integrate with Mocha, though. We just needed to stub out some of the node.js-specific code and provide a very small wrapper to provide our own module loader and reporting plugins. There is an active effort to split up Mocha into multiple modules in order to make it more portable, which would make the stubbing unnecessary, too.

>They should be blogging about use cases and customer successes, not benchmarks.

They do, just recently the cases of AskBlue (Location aware recommendations) and Thomson Reuters (Fast & Secure Single-View of Everything)

https://www.arangodb.com/why-arangodb/case-studies/

I am very interested in Graph-Cases and appreciate the support of Neo4J for projects like the Panama- or Paradise Papers that show how connected graphs help to understand former hidden relationships. Graphs are very powerful and a great addition to relational or document approaches.

(full disclosure: I worked for ArangoDB 2 years ago.) And, I've used Neo successfully for a fraud detection PoC recently...

I've played with ArangoDB[1] last year, when I was doing a self-learning sprint. While I never reached any level of proficiency in it, I did enjoy using it, and I'm still intrigued by the idea of a combined "graph, document, and key/value [data models] in a single core with the same query language"

I put my 'boilerplate experiment' code up on GitHub[2] after my self-learning sprint petered out, mainly in the hope that one day someone will come along and point out some of the more obvious errors and bad assumptions I made when building the boilerplate - I learn best from my errors!

[1] https://www.arangodb.com/
[2] https://github.com/KaliedaRik/boilerplate-experiment