R2GSync and edge views: practical RDBMS to GDBMS synchronization

Graph databases that are used in enterprises are primarily extracted from a main transactional store that is often an RDBMS. This data infrastructure set up raises the challenge of keeping the extracted graph in a graph database management system (GDBMS) in sync with the source RDBMS. When the extracted graphs contain edge types that are results of join queries, this synchronization requires incrementally maintaining these join queries. In this paper, we investigate an alternative design where we can map the individual relations in these joins to virtual nodes and edges to keep the synchronization very efficient and instead support view-based querying in the GDBMS. We present a system called R2GSync, that synchronizes an RDBMS with a GDBMS and our accompanying edge view design for a GDBMS. We describe our implementation of edge views in GraphflowDB and query optimization techniques for improving the performance of queries that involve edge views.