Ditch ActiveRecord for ActiveGraph is your new girlfriend

Rails was written in 2004, a time when RDBMS ruled the world and Pierce Brosnan was still James Bond! Today there's a plethora of NoSQL solutions gaining traction all around the world. Neo4J is the world's leading graph database. Written in Java, it serves some of the world's top companies and startups being 1000x faster than MySQL when it comes to deep joins. A graph database allows you to model your domain knowledge naturally as nodes connected by relationships, both of which can have an arbitrary number of properties and without the headaches of normalisation and other RDBMS idiosyncrasies. ActiveGraph is a fast, minimal Ruby ORM for Neo4J written on top of Neon - slim ruby binding for Neo4J. ActiveGraph integrates with Rails bringing everything you know and love about ActiveRecord on board. I'll tell you how you can easily swap out ActiveRecord and slid in ActiveGraph without disrupting your applications and almost instantly gaining performance, productivity and scalability by over several times and I'll tell you why you should embrace and love graphs, maybe even marry them! We as a community need to build better tools so more and more people can embrace this new approach and technology for data modelling.

Transcript

1. Ditch ActiveRecord for ActiveGraph is your new GF Twitter: @ujjwal_thaakar Github: @ujjwalt
4. Bulk operations for Rails Google Summer of Code 2013
6. A Janda? If you don’t get it then don’t bother asking A
7. Warning!
8. Agenda • Briefly go over Neo4J • The what, how and why of ORMs • Current gems for binding to Neo4J • Neon • ActiveGraph • Ask
10. 2004! Pierce Brosnan was still James Bond!
11. Property Graph User Weird User • id • since • strength FRIEND-OF • id • name • email • password • name • email • password • weirdness
12. • 1000x faster than MySQL for deep joins • Can handle billions of nodes easily • Millions of relationship traversals per second! • And yeah the relationships are directed • Cypher language for pattern matched traversal
13. ORMs • Object-Relational mapping • Convert data between incompatible type systems in OOP languages
14. Why • SQL databases only store scalar values • Objects aren't scalar • We need to convert objects to simpler scalar values and vice versa • Translate the object into a form storable on a database while preserving its properties and relationships for later retrieval
15. OGM • Graphs store objects and their relationships directly • So we coin a new name - Object Graph Mapping • Why? • Because I’m trying to be different
16. Current Gems • neo4j.rb • neo4j-core • neo4j-cypher • Andreas Ronge - Swedish developer • neography
18. Common API • Same API - embedded or REST • You either connect to the db or create/open one • Return ruby objects matching the interface for REST stuff • Mixin the Java objects from the embedded API and return them instead - RAW SPEED!
19. Neon.connect “http://my-server-host.com:7474” Neon.new “/path/to/database/folder” Neon Database GraphDa tabaseServ ice new connect
20. node = db.create_node({ name: “Ujjwal”, email: “ujjwal@thaakar@gmail.com” }, [:user, :awesome, :student]) ! node.create_rel_to another_node, :type
21. But I’m not RDoc!
22. • CRUD for Nodes and Relationships • DB synchronized hash • Identity map • Adding/Removing labels • Transactions • Auto Transactions
23. Database Node Transactio n Relationsh ip
24. • Two approaches • Implicit sessions • Explicit sessions
25. Transactions • Issue with Auto TX • Wrap REST operations inside a transaction for explicit transactions • Wrap embedded operations inside transactions for auto_tx enabled
26. Powerful stuff • Pretty much full compliance for Neo4J API • This is like tinker pops for Neo4J • Embedded matters for performance • First time ever! • Minimal
27. ActiveGraph • Name is a rip off • Code isn’t • API sorta is
28. ActiveModel Compliant • Nodes and Relationships are first class objects • Fully ActiveModel compliant as we use active_attr behind the scenes • Empirically high performance - benchmarks coming soon
29. ActiveRecord Duplicate! Not as bad though!
30. ActiveRecord API • class names map to labels on nodes • SpecialUser < User < ActiveGraph::Node • “SpecialUser”, “User” • Girlfriend < Friend < ActiveGraph::Relationship • “Girlfriend” but all properties of a “Friend”
31. Associations • has_one is an outgoing relationship • belongs_to is an incoming relationship • has_many is direction agnostic • has_one(:friend).from(“User#friends”) • has_n(:friend).to(“User”)
32. Composition • Compositions work • We store compositions as nodes with special relationships • ArangoDB solves this! Hail Lucas and his team!
33. Graph Expressiveness • Cypher is super cool • You give it a pattern and it traverses and matches subgraphs MATCH (user)-[:friend]->(follower)! WHERE user.name IN ['Joe', 'Maria', 'Steve'] AND follower.name =~ 'S.*'! RETURN user, follower.name
34. START me=node(1) MATCH (me)-[friend_rel:`friends`]->(friends) WHERE (friend_rel.since = 1994) RETURN friends Neo4j.query do node(1).outgoing(rel(:friends).where{|r| r[:since] == 1994}) end me = User.find name: “Ujjwal” Neo4j.query do me.outgoing(rel(:friends).where{|r| r[:since] == 1994}) end
35. Why you no live demo? Because I’m not German!
36. • Wrote Neon - didn’t like it • Started ActiveGraph - couldn’t settle on it • Rewriting right now • I’ll never get there!
37. German Work Culture • Germans are bitchy about their time • I like it! • Efficient - you do it once and you do it right • I’m gonna be a German in my work!
38. Ask • I’m new to Ruby • Please come and talk to me about the architecture • Even better help me build it • We need to build better tools to support NoSQL in Ruby • ujjwalt/neon • ujjwalt/activegraph
39. Thank You! • Q & A anyone? • Twitter: @ujjwal_thaakar • Github: @ujjwalt