Geequel

Geequel™ – Graph Query Language for the People!

/ Gee-Kwuhl /

Geequel is ONgDB’s powerful Graph Query Language. It is a declarative, pattern matching language optimized for querying graph networks. Geequel is an implementation of openCypher®, the most widely adopted, fully-specified, and open query language for property graph databases. Geequel provides an intuitive way to work with ONgDB, a property graph, and is a great on-ramp to the Graph Query Language (GQL) standard being developed by ISO. Geequel is easy to learn and human-readable, making Geequel approachable, useful and unifying for business analysts, data scientists, software developers and operations professionals. The declarative nature of Geequel allows users to simply express the data they wish to retrieve while the underlying Geequel query runtime completes the task without burdening the user with Geequel implementation details.

Geequel is one of the most powerful ways to effectively express graph database traversals for reading and writing data into ONgDB. Geequel makes it possible to direct ONgDB to do something like: “bring back my friends’ friends right now” or “starting with this employee return their full reporting chain” in the form of several code lines. As such, Geequel queries and operations across all languages and integrations with ONgDB are able to query in a consistent manner. Geequel looks a lot like ASCII art because it uses textual pattern representations to express nodes and relationships. The nodes are surrounded with parenthesis which appear like circles and the relationships consist of dashes with square brackets. Here’s an example: (graphs)-[:ARE]-(everywhere). Writing and representing depth based queries is one place where Geequel shines. To look at the friends of my friend’s friends is as simple as “(me)-[:FRIEND*3]->(fofof). It is actually fun to create queries because the declarative nature of Geequel follows direct patterns and relationships without having to think about what needs joining together to aggregate the required data.

In an RDBMS implementation with SQL, the queries mentioned above would involve a lot of code to write and perform poorly due to the number of joins. But with Geequel on ONgDB, it is possible to represent complex ideas with minimal code and optimized traversal performance at the same time.

The intent with Geequel is to implement all of GQL and a big portion of openCypher® (openCypher® is a trademark of Neo4j, Inc. [more])