Graphix: "One User's JSON is Another User's Graph"

The increasing prevalence of large graph data has produced a variety of research and applications tailored toward graph data management. Users aiming to perform graph analytics will typically start by importing existing data into a separate graph-purposed storage engine. The cost of maintaining a separate system (e.g., the data copy, the associated queries, etc …) just for graph analytics may be prohibitive for users with Big Data. In this paper, we introduce Graphix and show how it enables property graph views of existing document data in AsterixDB, a Big Data management system boasting a partitioned-parallel query execution engine. We explain a) the graph view user model of Graphix, b)$\text{gSQL}^{++}$, a novel query language extension for synergistic document-based navigational pattern matching, and c) how edge hops are evaluated in a parallel fashion. We then compare queries authored in$\text{gSQL}^{++}$against versions in other leading query languages. Finally, we evaluate our approach against a leading native graph database, Neo4j, and show that Graphix is appropriate for operational and analytical workloads, especially at scale.