Tag Archives: graph database

Feb 27 2023
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Rage, RelationalAI

All of NoSQL is because of this…

In this blog post, KuzuDB creator Semih Salihoğlu makes the case that graph databases need new join algorithms. If you’ve read the blog post and came away still a bit confused then look at the image above. This image shows what happens when you try to join 3 tables. The problem is that traditionally databases have used binary joins (two tables at a time) to execute queries. The intermediate result build up of these joins can get massive and eat a ton of memory and processing power. The more binary joins you have, the worse it gets.

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Jan 11 2023
4 Comments
Cypher, Testing

Bullshit Graph Database Performance Benchmarks

Hey HackerNews, let me just drop my mixtape, checkout my soundcloud and “Death Row” is the label that pays me.

How is the Graph Database category supposed to grow when vendors keep spouting off complete bullshit? I wrote a bit about the ridiculous benchmark Memgraph published last month hoping they would do the right thing and make an attempt at a real analysis. Instead these clowns put it on a banner on top of their home page. So let’s tear into it.

At first I considered replicating it using their own repository, but it’s about 2000 lines of Python and I don’t know Python. Worse still, the work is under a “Business Source License” which states:

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Jan 09 2023
3 Comments
Cypher, Rage, RelationalAI

Death Star Queries in Graph Databases

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope Death Star

In Cypher, we call any unbounded star query a “Death Star” query. You’ll recognize it if you see a star between two brackets in any part of the query:

-[*]-

the deadly pattern of a death star query

The “star” in Cypher means “keep going”, and when it is not bound by a path length -[*..3]- or relationship type(s) -[:KNOWS|FRIENDS*]- it tends to blow up Alderaaning servers. It’s hard to find a valid reason for this query, but its less deadly cousins are very important in graph workloads.

For example when looking at fraud, we may start with a Customer node and ask, which known Fraudulent nodes are within 4 hops away? A Customer HAS an Account that was ACCESSED by a Device that ACCESSED another Account that BELONGS_TO a known Fraudster. A Customer HAS a mailing Address that is very SIMILAR to an Address that BELONGS_TO a Business that is partially OWNED by a known Fraudster. These are just two out of many valid patterns in our graph. Graph databases were designed to handle these kind of queries. The trick is that every node KNOWS its relationships, every node KNOWS how it is connected.

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Dec 06 2022
1 Comment
Rage

KHop Baby One More Time

Some of the most beloved songs by main stream artists were written by Max Martin. The song “Baby One More Time” came out in 1999 and sold over 10m copies. It propelled Britney Spears into pop stardom. If we were to look at the graph above, with Max Martin in the center, then one hop away are the songs he wrote which would become #1s on the Billboards Hot 100. Two hops away are the Artists that performed those #1 songs. It is beyond question that Max Martin knows how to write good pop songs. I wish I had his talent. I only know how to write half way decent KHop implementations.

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Dec 01 2022
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Rage

Dark Mode

I tend to only find time to work on RageDB at night. Staring at code in CLion using the “Darcula” theme works great. But like a vampire exposed to direct sunlight, things go horribly wrong when I try to test what I am working on using the RageDB front-end. You see, besides the code-editor, the rest of the interface is very bright. Blindingly so:

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Sep 05 2022
3 Comments
Rage, Random

Observations of the LDBC SNB Benchmark

RageDB Mascot running

I’m still trying to figure out the right look for the language folks will use to talk to RageDB. Instead of waiting until I have it figured out, I decided I should write all the queries for the LDBC SNB Benchmark to prepare for a full run in the next few months. Now that we added “stored procedures” to RageDB, the benchmark code is trivial. I send a post request to the Lua url with the name of the query plus any parameters it may need which are in a CSV file. Here is Short Query 4 for example and they all look like this besides the different parameters:

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Aug 30 2022
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Rage, RelationalAI

Watch your Language

I was watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and one of the more jarring issues of the first two episodes is that Midge keeps getting arrested for the things she says. It reminded me of the song “Me So Horny” from 2 Live Crew that landed the hip hop group in jail charged with obscenity. Record store owners were getting arrested for selling CDs to undercover cops. How insane does that all sound? But it strikes the point that language matters. The things we say and how we say them are powerful. They convey meaning and emotion, language can be pleasant or it can be foul.

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Jun 20 2022
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RelationalAI

Query Optimizers are made of sand

I’ve written a ton of SQL and Cypher queries over the last 20 years…and I’ve rewritten those queries as stored procedures more times than I can count. The issues with the expressivity of the query language and the ability of the query optimizer to “do the right thing” have been around longer than my career. I’ve written about this problem before. I went so far as to completely give up. In RageDB I let the developer write the query in a programming language directly. Skipping the “middle man” and letting the user be the query optimizer. Because in the end… this is what always happens. Well almost always.

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May 10 2022
1 Comment
Rage

Getting a Mascot

Everything cool deserves an awesome mascot. Postgres has an elephant named Slonik. MySQL has a dolphin named Sakila. Linux has a Penguin named Tux. ScyllaDB has a sea monster. RedPanda has a… you guessed it, a Red Panda. Zig was too cool for one mascot so they have two “Ziguanas“. PHP has an elephant too. Rust has a Crab named Ferris. TerminusDB has a cowduck. Docker has a whale, but it was almost a giraffe. One of the most famous mascots around is the GitHub Octocat named Mona. Go has a Gopher and they even have a website where you can make your own gopher, how cool is that?

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Apr 12 2022
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Rage

Let’s build something Outrageous – Part 25: Dates in C++ and Faster Imports 

Back in February, we added the ability to load a CSV file and alter the contents while importing it. We also added Date support to RageDB using a Lua library. This was a masterful job of copy and paste and got us lots of functionality very quickly. When we timed the import for LDBC SNB SF10 it came in at 28 minutes. Which wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great. Let’s try to speed that up today.

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