Max De Marzi

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.

The idea of using a programing language as the way to write queries against the database makes many security folks hyperventilate. In order to lower their heart-rate and slow their breathing we have to limit the queries using a technique known as “sandboxing“. The Sol2 library we are using in RageDB lets us create an “environment” where our queries will run. Let’s see how we go about doing this.

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Written by Blaise Pascal is often misattributed to Mark Twain. It reminds us to try to be brief. Too many people never learn this.

Valentine’s Day was earlier this week, maybe you took your significant other to dinner, sent flowers or candy to your crush, even bought a card for that special someone. I bet however you didn’t profess your love to your favorite software library. I did. I love Roaring Bitmaps. Like Mariah Carey, I can’t live without it, so I won’t. I added Roaring Bitmaps to RageDB.

The folks who build the database are not the same folks who use the database and that causes problems. It has been my number 1 complaint for the past decade or so. People building features in isolation can’t see the forest for the trees and the end user experience suffers. I ran into this video from Molham Aref where he puts it quite nicely:

A few years ago I was really angry at the traversal performance I was getting on some slow query. So angry that I wrote a couple thousand lines of C code just to calm myself down. This is how Neo4c came about. This blog post explains the just of it. Neo4c was able to crank out 330 million traversals per second on a single core (because it was single threaded code) for a hand crafted “query” written in C using 32 bit ids (so limited to 4b nodes and 4b relationships). It wasn’t really a fair comparison to Neo4j, but it made me realize there was a lot of performance out there to be had. Let’s see where we are today.