Implementing Views for Property Graphs
Soonbo Han, Zachary G. Ives · ACM SIGMOD Record · 2025
Property graph databases are increasingly used to integrate heterogeneous data, motivating graph views to abstract, simplify, and unify the data, e.g., to capture individual-level vs. organization-level relationships. This paper considers the tasks of implementing such views using rewriting techniques — both using existing property graph DBMSs and converting to relational RDBMSs. We consider both virtual and materialized views, ways of rewriting queries, and structures for indexing data. We also note a common use case of graph views, which involves preserving a graph except minor local transformations; we develop novel extensions and semantics for this. We evaluate and compare the performance of our techniques under a variety of workloads, and we compare existing graph and relational DBMS platforms.