Antony is travelling up to Portland for this great event that’s about to start Fri evening and going over the weekend. He’ll be showing other devs and people more about the OQGRAPH engine, and gathering useful feedback.

Open Query is, together with many others (I see Giuseppe, Facebook, Gear6, Google, Infobright, Jeremy Cole, PrimeBase Technologies, Percona, Monty Program, and lots more), sponsoring the event so that it’s accessible for everybody – reducing the key factor to getting there rather than having to worry about high conf fees.

Having acquired the world’s biggest jetlag flying to Charlottesville VA for last year’s OpenSQL Camp, I can confirm from personal experience that it’s a great event. While I can’t be there this time, I’m looking forward to hearing all about it!

Antony has done a bit of magic, considerably speeding up inserts. Since the base implementation does not have persistence, insert speed is particularly important. Copying the 2×89,051 edges for the Tree-of-Life example is now near-instant.

The delete bug has been fixed.

There’s a new Maze example in the OQGRAPH trunk on Launchpad, first introduced in my MySQL University session. I created/inserted a maze of 1 million rooms (that comes to about 3 million edges), and OQGRAPH found the shortest path (122330 steps for this particular maze) in abound one second. That’s pretty good, I

Only a few weeks after Walter’s session on Multi-Master Replication with MMM and thanks to the great gang at MySQL Docs (my colleagues from long ago!) I’ll be doing a MySQL University session in a few days, about the GRAPH computation engine. From talks/demos I’ve done about it so far, I’ve learnt that people love it but there are lots of interesting questions. After all, it’s a pretty new and in a way exotic thing.

MySQL University uses DimDim, an online presentation service. You’ll see slides, and hear my voice. You can also type questions in a live chat room. We actually even got desktop sharing working so a live demo is possible, we’ll see how that goes on the day (I’ll make sure to

The MySQL 5.0 and MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 source code is now also available through Launchpad. If you were waiting for a version for 5.1 and are ok with building the plugin from source, now you can!

The repo contains a subdir for examples, we’re hoping many people will contribute little snippets and scripts to import and use interesting datasets. To give you a hint, with graph capabilities you are able to deal with RDF data sources. You just need to transform the XML to say CSV, import into a suitable structure, and copy the edge information across to an OQGRAPH table.

Roland Bouman’s tree-of-life (which uses xslt stylesheets) are a good example of that approach, and was the first entry in the examples tree,

Antony and I are busy getting the Open Query GRAPH Engine code ready so you all can play with it, but we needed to test with a larger dataset to make sure all was fundamentally well with the system.

We have some intersting suitable dataset sources, but the first we tried in ernest because it was easy to get in (thanks to Roland Bouman for both the idea and providing xslt stylesheets to transform the set), was the Tree of Life which is a hierarchy of 89052 entries showing how biological species on earth are related to eachother.

GRAPH engine operates in a directed fashion, so I inserted the connections both ways resulting in 178102 entries. So, I inserted A->B as well as B->A for each connection. So we now have a real graph, not just a simple tree.

The GRAPH engine allows you to deal with hierarchies and graphs in a purely relational way. So, we can find all children of an item, path from an item to a root node, shortest path between two items, and so on, each with a simple basic query structure using standard SQL grammar.

The engine is implemented as a MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 plugin (we’re working on a 5.0 backport for some clients) and thus runs with an unmodified server.

Demo time! I’ll simplify/strip a little bit here for space reasons, but what’s here is plain cut/paste from a running server, no edits

-- insert a few entries with connections (and multiple paths)
insert into foo (origid, destid) values (1,2), (2,3), (2,4), (4,5), (3,6), (5,6);
-- a regular table to join on to
insert into people values (1,"pearce"),(2,"hunnicut"),(3,"potter"),