CivicGraph is now RecallGraph

Aditya Mukhopadhyay — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 10:10:28 +0000

I had posted earlier about an open source temporal graph database that I have built, named CivicGraph.

I am thrilled to follow up on that with a lineup of exciting announcements:

CivicGraph is now renamed to RecallGraph. This was deemed necessary to avoid confusion with another identically named (but functionally different) product by Microsoft. Also, the new name serves as a useful reminder for what the product is designed to do.
RecallGraph has its own sparkling new home. Check out https://recallgraph.tech/.
There is also a dedicated documentation website, replete with concepts, terminologies and a comprehensive guide to getting started with the product. Check out https://docs.recallgraph.tech/.
New API endpoints to support advanced functionalities like purge and restore.
Built-in support for distributed tracing, based on the OpenTracing standard.
More improvements, both major and minor, all listed at https://docs.recallgraph.tech/working-with-recallgraph/changelog#1-0-0.
Support for Foxx's service linking, documented at https://recallgraph.github.io/RecallGraph/.
A community support forum hosted at Gitter.
Swagger API documentation (standalone) at https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis-docs/RecallGraph/RecallGraph/1.0.0#/.

There are still miles to go, with a long development roadmap ahead. I am indeed grateful to all of you who have supported and encouraged me to keep building and improving this project! I hope it provides productive service in your tech stack(s) some day.

CivicGraph - A versioning data store for time-variant graph data.

Aditya Mukhopadhyay — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 15:01:01 +0000

I would like to introduce an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed project of mine: https://github.com/CivicGraph/CivicGraph

CivicGraph is a versioned-graph data store - it retains all changes that its data (vertices and edges) have gone through to reach their current state. It supports point-in-time graph traversals, letting the user query any past state of the graph just as easily as the present.

It is a Foxx Microservice for ArangoDB that features VCS-like semantics in many parts of its interface, and is backed by a transactional event tracker. It is currently being developed and tested on ArangoDB v3.5, with support for v3.6 in the pipeline.

CivicGraph is a potential fit for scenarios where data is best represented as a network of vertices and edges (i.e., a graph) having the following characteristics:

Both vertices and edges can hold properties in the form of attribute/value pairs (equivalent to JSON objects).
Documents (vertices/edges) mutate within their lifespan (both in their individual attributes/values and in their relations with each other).
Past states of documents are as important as their present, necessitating retention and queryability of their change history.

Its API is split into 3 top-level categories:

Document

Create - Create single/multiple documents (vertices/edges).
Replace - Replace entire single/multiple documents with new content.
Delete - Delete single/multiple documents.
Update - Add/Update specific fields in single/multiple documents.
(Planned) Explicit Commits - Commit a document's changes separately, after it has been written to DB via other means (AQL / Core REST API / Client).
(Planned) CQRS/ES Operation Mode - Async implicit commits.

Event

Log - Fetch a log of events (commits) for a given path pattern (path determines scope of documents to pick). The log can be optionally grouped/sorted/sliced within a specified time interval.
Diff - Fetch a list of forward or reverse commands (diffs) between commits for specified documents.
(Planned) Branch/Tag - Create parallel versions of history, branching off from a specific event point of the main timeline. Also, tag specific points in branch+time for convenient future reference.
(Planned) Materialization - Point-in-time checkouts.

History

Show - Fetch a set of documents, optionally grouped/sorted/sliced, that match a given path pattern, at a given point in time.
Filter - In addition to a path pattern like in 'Show', apply an expression-based, simple/compound post-filter on the retrieved documents.
Traverse - A point-in-time traversal (walk) of a past version of the graph, with the option to apply additional post-filters to the result.

I hope some of you may find this a useful service to address several types of data modelling challenges pertaining to retention and querying of historical graph data.

DEV Community: Aditya Mukhopadhyay

CivicGraph is now RecallGraph

CivicGraph - A versioning data store for time-variant graph data.

Document

Event

History