greycat icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
greycat copied to clipboard

Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon datathings

Some questions about GrayCat

Open Alan47 opened this issue 6 years ago • 2 comments

Hi!

I just discovered GrayCat and its concept is really interesting. I do have some questions that I could not find answers to in the documentation, so I thought I might ask them here.

  1. Does GrayCat interop with Apache TinkerPop in any way? Is there any sort of connector? The two seem very related (TinkerPop is also based on a property graph).
  2. How are queries on the graph expressed in GrayCat, beyond "find all of type x"? Such as navigational queries for example.
  3. Can GrayCat be used as a production database? Is there any form of transaction support (in the sense of ACID)? If so, which ACID guarantees are provided (in particular with respect to atomicity and durability)?

Thanks,

Alan

Alan47 avatar Sep 16 '18 13:09 Alan47

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your message!

Unfortunately, currently GreyCat doesn't have a connector to Apache TinkerPop. It is definitely something we are thinking about investigating in the future, but for now GreyCat comes with it's own querying/processing API. This is also due to the fact that GreyCat is a full temporal graph (https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01511636/document), which isn't really considered by querying languages like TinkerPop.

In order to query graphs in GreyCat, you need indices. GreyCat comes with two different types of indices, local and global indices. Global indices are used as "entry points" to the graph, local indices are used for very large relations from a node to other nodes. You can find out more about indices here https://greycat.ai/doc/start/indexing.html and here https://greycat.ai/doc/modeling/indexes.html.

GreyCat does (currently) not provide any ACID guarantees, nor transactions. However, we are working on this for a future release.
As for the question, if GreyCat can be used as a production database, it of course always depends on your requirements... We usually use GreyCat as an additional "analytics" platform and database, rather than replacing the existing data storage systems of clients. However, if you don't need transactions/ACID guarantees, there is nothing speaking agains using it as (only) production database.

We hope this could answer your questions but don't hesitate to come back to us in case of further questions.

Best, The GreyCat team

thomashartmann avatar Sep 26 '18 07:09 thomashartmann

Hi Thomas, thank you for the clarifications, this was very helpful.

Thanks!

Alan

Alan47 avatar Sep 26 '18 07:09 Alan47