Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

July 15, 2012

How To Use A Graph Database to Integrate And Analyze Relational Exports

Filed under: Graph Databases,Graphs,InfiniteGraph,RDBMS — Patrick Durusau @ 4:08 pm

How To Use A Graph Database to Integrate And Analyze Relational Exports by Todd Stavish.

From the post:

Graph databases can be used to analyze data from disparate datasources. In this use-case, three relational databases have been exported to CSV. Each relational export is ingested into its own sharded sub-graph to increase performance and avoid lock contention when merging the datasets. Unique keys overlap the datasources to provide the mechanism to link the subgraphs produced from parsing the CSV. A REST server is used to send the merged graph to a visualization application for analysis.

Cleaning out my pending posts file when I ran this one.

Would be a good comparison case for my topic maps class.

Although I would have to do in installation work on a public facing server and leave the class members to do the analysis/uploading.

Hmmm, perhaps split the class into teams, some of which using this method, some using more traditional record linkage and some using topic maps, all on the same data.

Suggestions on data sets that would highlight the differences? Or result in few differences at all? (I suspect both to be true, depending upon the data sets.)

May 15, 2012

Introducing Neo4j into a Relational Database Organisation

Filed under: Neo4j,RDBMS — Patrick Durusau @ 2:20 pm

Introducing Neo4j into a Relational Database Organisation

The details:

What: Neo4J User Group:Introducing Neo4j into a Relational Database Organisation
Where: The Skills Matter eXchange, London
When: 23 May 2012 Starts at 18:30

From the webpage:

This month, Toby O’Rourke and Michael McCarthy present their experiences of introducing Neo4j into Gamesys: a Relational Database Organisation.

You will hear about Toby and Michael’s experiences, including

  • the path taken from spring data through tinkerpop, to straight neo then spring data again
  • Satisfying the reporting requirements of a place built on a data warehouse approach
  • Modelling our domain
  • Experience of support contracts and the community as a whole

Just in case you need an additional reason to be in London on 23 May 2012, consult London Drum City Guide. 😉

March 5, 2012

Trees in the Database: Advanced Data Structures

Filed under: Data Structures,Database,PostgreSQL,RDBMS,SQL,Trees — Patrick Durusau @ 7:52 pm

Trees in the Database: Advanced Data Structures

Lorenzo Alberton writes:

Despite the NoSQL movement trying to flag traditional databases as a dying breed, the RDBMS keeps evolving and adding new powerful weapons to its arsenal. In this talk we’ll explore Common Table Expressions (SQL-99) and how SQL handles recursion, breaking the bi-dimensional barriers and paving the way to more complex data structures like trees and graphs, and how we can replicate features from social networks and recommendation systems. We’ll also have a look at window functions (SQL:2003) and the advanced reporting features they make finally possible. The first part of this talk will cover several different techniques to model a tree data structure into a relational database: parent-child (adjacency list) model, materialized path, nested sets, nested intervals, hybrid models, Common Table Expressions. Then we’ll move one step forward and see how we can model a more complex data structure, i.e. a graph, with concrete examples from today’s websites. Starting from real-world examples of social networks’ and recommendation systems’ features, and with the help of some graph theory, this talk will explain how to represent and traverse a graph in the database. Finally, we will take a look at Window Functions and how they can be useful for data analytics and simple inline aggregations, among other things. All the examples have been tested on PostgreSQL >= 8.4.

Very impressive presentation!

Definitely makes me want to dust off my SQL installations and manuals for a closer look!

October 5, 2011

Oracle, NoSQL and Topic Maps

Filed under: RDBMS,SQL — Patrick Durusau @ 3:27 am

There have been more tweets about Oracle’s recent NoSQL offering than Lucene turning 10 years old. The information content has been about the same.

The Oracle tweets, “if you can’t beat them, join them,” “we have been waiting for your,” etc., don’t appreciate a software vendor’s view of the world.

Software vendors, as opposed to software cultists, offer products customers are likely to lease or purchase. A software vendor would port vi to the iPhone 5 if there was enough customer demand.

Which in an embarrassing way explains why Oracle doesn’t support topic maps, lack of customer demand.

Topic maps do have customer demand, at least enough to keep any number of topic map service/software vendors afloat. But, those customers don’t make up enough appeal for Oracle to move into the topic map field.

The NoSQL people may have a model we can follow (perhaps even using NoSQL as backends).

They isolated use cases of interest to customers, then demonstrated impressive performance numbers on those use cases.

Question: So how do I learn what use cases are of interest to others? That could be impacted by topic maps?*


*I know what use cases are of interest to me but a comparative Semitic linguistics topic map isn’t likely to have high demand as an iPhone app, for example. Quite doable with topic maps but not commercially compelling.

February 28, 2011

RDBMS in the Social Networks Age

Filed under: Networks,RDBMS,Social Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 10:03 am

RDBMS in the Social Networks Age by Lorenzo Alberton.

A slide deck that made me wish I had seen the presentation!

Its treatment of graph representation in a relational system is particularly strong.

The bibliography is useful as well.

Just to tempt you into viewing the slide deck, slide 19, The Boring Stuff, is very amusing.

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