The Gremlin Graph Traversal Machine and Language

Gremlin is a graph traversal machine and language designed, developed, and distributed by the Apache TinkerPop project. Gremlin, as a graph traversal machine, is composed of three interacting components: a graph $G$, a traversal $\Psi$, and a set of traversers $T$. The traversers move about the graph according to the instructions specified in the traversal, where the result of the computation is the ultimate locations of all halted traversers. A Gremlin machine can be executed over any supporting graph computing system such as an OLTP graph database and/or an OLAP graph processor. Gremlin, as a graph traversal language, is a functional language implemented in the user's native programming language and is used to define the $\Psi$ of a Gremlin machine. This article provides a mathematical description of Gremlin and details its automaton and functional properties. These properties enable Gremlin to naturally support imperative and declarative querying, host language agnosticism, user-defined domain specific languages, an extensible compiler/optimizer, single- and multi-machine execution models, hybrid depth- and breadth-first evaluation, as well as the existence of a Universal Gremlin Machine and its respective entailments.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Database Programming Languages Conferenc

Formalizing Gremlin pattern matching traversals in an integrated graph Algebra

Graph data management (also called NoSQL) has revealed beneficial characteristics in terms of flexibility and scalability by differ-ently balancing between query expressivity and schema flexibility. This peculiar advantage has resulted into an unforeseen race of developing new task-specific graph systems, query languages and data models, such as property graphs, key-value, wide column, resource description framework (RDF), etc. Present-day graph query languages are focused towards flex-ible graph pattern matching (aka sub-graph matching), whereas graph computing frameworks aim towards providing fast parallel (distributed) execution of instructions. The consequence of this rapid growth in the variety of graph-based data management systems has resulted in a lack of standardization. Gremlin, a graph traversal language, and machine provide a common platform for supporting any graph computing sys-tem (such as an OLTP graph database or OLAP graph processors). In this extended report, we present a formalization of graph pattern match-ing for Gremlin queries. We also study, discuss and consolidate various existing graph algebra operators into an integrated graph algebra

Mogwaï: a Framework to Handle Complex Queries on Large Models

International audienceWhile Model Driven Engineering is gaining more industrial interest, scalability issues when managing large models have become a major problem in current modeling frameworks. Scalable model persistence has been achieved by using NoSQL backends for model storage, but existing modeling framework APIs have not evolved accordingly, limiting NoSQL query performance benefits. In this paper we present the Mogwaï a scalable and efficient model query framework based on a direct translation of OCL queries to Gremlin, a query language supported by several NoSQL databases. Generated Gremlin expressions are computed inside the database itself, bypassing limitations of existing framework APIs and improving overall performance, as confirmed by our experimental results showing an improvement of execution time up to a factor of 20 and a reduction of the memory overhead up to a factor of 75 for large models

Graph-Based CPE Matching for Identification of Vulnerable Asset Configurations

In this manuscript, we propose a graph-based approach for identification of vulnerable asset configurations via Common Platform Enumeration matching. The approach consists of a graph model and insertion procedure that is able to represent and store information about CVE vulnerabilities and different configurations of CPE-classified asset components. These building blocks are accompanied with a search query in Gremlin graph traversal language that is able to find all vulnerable pairs of CVEs and asset configurations in a single traversal, as opposed to a conventional brute-force approach