research-article

Representing Paths in Graph Database Pattern Matching

Authors:

Matthias Niewerth,

Stijn Vansummeren,

Domagoj VrgočAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 16, Issue 7

Pages 1790 - 1803

https://doi.org/10.14778/3587136.3587151

Published: 01 March 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Modern graph database query languages such as GQL, SQL/PGQ, and their academic predecessor G-Core promote paths to first-class citizens in the sense that their pattern matching facility can return paths, as opposed to only nodes and edges. This is challenging for database engines, since graphs can have a large number of paths between a given node pair, which can cause huge intermediate results in query evaluation.

We introduce the concept of path multiset representations (PMRs), which can represent multisets of paths exponentially succinctly and therefore bring significant advantages for representing intermediate results. We give a detailed theoretical analysis that shows that they are especially well-suited for representing results of regular path queries and extensions thereof involving counting, random sampling, and unions. Our experiments show that they drastically improve scalability for regular path query evaluation, with speedups of several orders of magnitude.

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cover image Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment

Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment Volume 16, Issue 7

March 2023

203 pages

ISSN:2150-8097

Editors:
Georgia Koutrika
Athena Research Center
,
Jun Yang
Duke University

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VLDB Endowment

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Published: 01 March 2023

Published in PVLDB Volume 16, Issue 7

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3707292.3707337
Gidado AEzeife C(2024)iHSPRec: Image Enhanced Historical Sequential Pattern RecommendationProceedings of the 2024 8th International Conference on Information System and Data Mining10.1145/3686397.3686411(79-89)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651601
Hogan AVrgoć DBarcelo PSanchez-Pi NMeliou ASudarshan S(2024)Querying Graph Databases at ScaleCompanion of the 2024 International Conference on Management of Data10.1145/3626246.3654695(585-589)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
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Arroyuelo DGómez-Brandón ANavarro G(2024)Evaluating regular path queries on compressed adjacency matricesThe VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases10.1007/s00778-024-00885-634:1Online publication date: 26-Nov-2024
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