Recent posts

Some thoughts about user defined functions (UDF) in databases

Last week I came across a Twitter thread about using stored procedures or in other words, user defined functions in databases. Every myth about them has already been debunked like 13 years ago in this excellent post: Mythbusters: Stored Procedures Edition. I can completely get behind it, but also like some personal thoughts and share […]

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Run your integration tests against Testcontainers with GraalVM native image

I have started working with a small team on an exciting project at Neo4j. The project is about database connectivity (what else) and we use Testcontainers in our integration tests, asserting the actual network connectivity and eventually the API. The thing we are creating should of course also work when being compiled as part of […]

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Why would a Neo4j person be so found of an embedded, relational database?

I am working since 2018 for Neo4j. At Neo4j I maintain both Spring Data Neo4j and Neo4j-OGM, both object mappers and entity managers for our database product. This is a great job in a great company with awesome colleagues such as my friends Gerrit and Michael. Some other projects I created on the job are […]

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Integrate the AuthManager of Neo4j’s Java Driver with Spring Boot

The following post is more a less a dump of code. Since version 5.8 the official Neo4j drivers supports expiration of authentication tokens (see Introduce AuthToken rotation and session auth support. The PR states: “The feature might also be referred to as a refresh or re-auth. In practice, it allows replacing the current token with […]

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The best way to use Testcontainers from your Spring Boot tests!

After a long time of blog hiatus, I was in the mood of trying out one of these “The best way to XYZ” posts for once. While Spring Boot 3 and Spring Framework 6 releases have focused a lot on revamping the application context and annotation processing for GraalVM native image compatibility (and “boring” tasks […]

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Spring Data and Spring Data Neo4j join the “No OFFSET Movement!”

Markus Winand has blogged about tool support for keyset pagination nearly a decade ago and of course my friend Lukas Eder has picked up that topic and did not only blog about it several times but implemented tool support with the the synthetic seek-clause of jOOQ. As the seek clause in jOOQ is excellent for […]

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About

Hi! My name is Michael Simons. I live in Aachen and create software for a living. You can read more about me on the "About me" page. This blog mostly contains posts about Java and Softwarearchitecture with a strong focus on the Spring eco system.
Below is a list of featured posts and a collection of talks. Featured posts are either part of a bigger series, have a relevance somewhere else or are just posts I like.
See all posts in the archive. Just another nerd blog is more than 10 years old and the archive has become quite huge.
Good stuff cannot be achieved alone. A salute to several great people in my life: NetBeans Dream team and more. And certainly, lots of ❤️ to my family and my wife who always supports me and my crazy ideas.