Data versioning

[Gavin Baumanis]

Hi Everyone,

I am really quite new to graph databases and am wondering how I might go about the following, please.

How do I go about "versioning" my data?

Let's assume I am using a RDBMS, what I normally do to achieve this is to insert a new row of data for all updates with a timestamp.

Whenever I need to retrieve anything, all my queries have an additional where clause along the lines of;

"where timestamp is newest".

So I get to keep all of my historical data, for auditing or BI/data warehouse purposes - but my "application" only ever sees the "current state" data.

Is it as simple as adding a timestamp property to all my graph components?

Thanks for any thoughts you might have.

-Gavin 

[Ted Wilmes]

Hi Gavin,

Your approach of adding timestamp properties to your vertices and edges is on the right track.  You can then 

manually add the necessary filtering to your queries or develop a traversal strategy that does it for you [1].  It is 

also possible to add properties on properties, so this provides some interesting options for 

adding temporal information at the individual property level.

Here are two nice references discussing time-based data versioning in property graphs in more detail:

* http://www.slideshare.net/datablend/fluxgraph-a-timemachine-for-your-graphs

* http://iansrobinson.com/2014/05/13/time-based-versioned-graphs/

Note that the neither of these references discuss TinkerPop 3 so the basic ideas will hold but the 

implementation details will be different.

--Ted

[1] http://tinkerpop.apache.org/docs/current/reference/#traversalstrategy

[Gavin Baumanis]

Awesome - thanks very ted.

Good to see I am not totally off the reservation, too!

-Gavin.