An Automated Graph Construction Approach from Relational Databases to Neo4j

Abstract

There are still few research methods proposed to convert relational databases to graph databases. Although a graph database has been equipped with a scripting language to use for querying and converting the data, it still requires time-consuming efforts by the domain expert to analyze the various constraints present in the source database. This paper proposes a novel technique to help automate the conversion by extracting relational database metadata and then sorting the entity relationships before converting them into graphs. To validate the conversion results, the total number of records in the source database with the number of nodes and edges created in the graph database are compared, and the node properties are validated for consistency using a probabilistic data structure. Based on our test results, their completeness can be checked accurately and efficiently with test parameters that can be adjusted according to the size of the source database.