RapidFlow: An Efficient Approach to Continuous Subgraph Matching

Continuous subgraph matching (CSM) is an important building block in many real-time graph processing applications. Given a subgraph query Q and a data graph stream, a CSM algorithm reports the occurrences of Q in the stream. Specifically, when a new edge e arrives in the stream, existing CSM algorithms start from the inserted e in the current data graph G to search Q. However, this rigid matching order of always starting from e can lead to a massive number of partial results that will turn out futile. Also, if Q contains automorphisms, there will be a lot of redundant computation in the matching process. To address these two problems, we propose RapidFlow, an effective approach to CSM. First, we design a query reduction technique, which reduces CSM to batch subgraph matching (BSM) where we enumerate all results in a region of G that will be affected by the update. The well-established BSM techniques can determine effective matching orders, not necessarily starting from the newly inserted edge. Second, to eliminate redundant computation caused by automorphisms in Q , we propose dual matching, which leverages the duality of Q and G in the matching process. Extensive experiment results show that RapidFlow outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, including TurboFlux and SymBi, by up to two orders of magnitude on various workloads.