Time flies. I feel like only few months ago I was sitting at Caffè Trieste, my favourite spot in San Francisco, or at Clairmont’s in Windsor, where I lived for more than 21 years. Those two places inspired me most, and from them I wrote the majority of my blogs and articles, and designed my products.
What happened since then? In 2018 I was frequently traveling to San Francisco, where I co-founded Dianomic Systems Inc., a company focused on collecting and managing data for IIoT. I was flying back and forth, often staying longer than just a few days in order to adapt to the time zone and function “properly.” A word of advice: don’t ever do that. It is poison for your body—a constant reset of your biological clock. On my way back to the UK one time, I fainted from exhaustion, headaches, and muscle pain. When I finally made it home, I slept for 48 hours straight. That was my wake-up call: I had to make a big decision. Either stay with my family in Windsor and close to my parents in Milan, or spend most of my time in the Bay Area. I chose the former. With the sadness that comes from having to leave behind something deeply important, I stepped away from Dianomic and joined Neo4j, which allowed me to work from London and travel “less.”
Could I have traveled less and worked more from home while still supporting a startup? Perhaps—but if you’ve ever built one, you know the stress and sheer energy it requires. I didn’t feel comfortable giving less than what I thought was necessary to nurture a newborn company. On the other hand, Neo4j was a strong attraction. It meant going back to my roots in the database world. I liked the people, I liked the product, and I could see there was a lot of important work to do.
Here I am, seven years later. Neo4j has nearly quintupled in size. I now have a team helping me manage the product. Engineering has become a wonderful, powerful machine with established processes. In these seven years, just my team alone has delivered a wide range of features:
- Multi-database functionality within the same DBMS
- The most sophisticated Role-Based Access Control in the market
- An advanced clustering solution for databases, which we call Autonomous Clustering
- Sharded and federated graphs using Cypher query language structures, known as Composite Databases
- A parallel runtime for Cypher queries, enabling operational and analytical workloads on the same system
- GQL compliance (the second ISO database language after SQL) for Cypher
- New store formats to reduce IOPS and improve performance
- New indexing technologies and constraints
- …and much more.
Now, seven years on, as I celebrate my 60th birthday and reflect on more than 40 years in the database world (I began by learning and teaching DEC RDB—later Oracle—and building applications with dBase II), I still find joy in innovating and creating new features for this market.
What’s next?
You’ll see in upcoming blog posts. I’ve taken on new challenges, perfectly aligned with the spirit of the moment.
No, I am not jumping on the AI bandwagon by funding a .ai startup or by building AI/GenAI-based services. I believe I can serve the world better by focusing on what I do best: improving and integrating existing technologies to meet both current and future needs. AI will not be truly useful without a solid infrastructure that goes beyond inference servers and search engines. For that, we need to consider two fundamental concepts:
- A set of structured facts, best served through knowledge graphs.
- A set of rules that can model and achieve goals—whether tasks involve transactions, data generation, or natural-language answers—best delivered through graph intelligence.
So, stay tuned. Another seven years of innovation may come.
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