Luca Garulli: Switching from Relational to the Graph model

Thanks to Rackspace for hosting this meeting. The host for the evening will be Chance Coble.

Luca Garulli (https://www.linkedin.com/in/garulli) (@lgarulli (http://twitter.com/lgarulli)) contacted me to let me know that he'd be in Austin for a few days and asked if we could set up a meetup for him. (Yes!) I've been following Luca's work as author of the OrientDB (http://www.orientechnologies.com/orientdb/) (wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OrientDB)) for several years now. This is one of Luca's first appearances in the US.

For this meetup, Luca has offered to share with us on how to think about and work with graph data. For those of us who have spent considerable time modeling data in relational databases, this is a bit of a conceptual leap -- but not a difficult one.

If you've been interested in learning more about graph databases, this will be a great opportunity.

Please join me in welcoming Luca to Austin.

-Lynn

About OrientDB

OrientDB is an open source NoSQL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL) database management system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_management_system) written in Java (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)). It is a document-based database, but the relationships are managed as in graph databases with direct connections between records. It supports schema-less, schema-full and schema-mixed modes. It has a strong security profiling system based on users and roles and supports SQL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL) as a query language. OrientDB uses a new indexing algorithm called MVRB-Tree, derived from the Red-Black Tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-Black_Tree) and from the B+Tree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%2BTree); this reportedly has benefits of having both fast insertions and fast lookups.

About Luca Garulli

Luca Garulli is the original author of the OrientDB product and the main committer. In order to handle indexes in the most efficient way, Luca created the new MVRB-Tree algorithm (it was originally referred to as the RB+Tree but another different algorithm already exists with that name) as mix of Red-Black Tree and B+Tree. MVRB stands for Multi Value Red Black because it stores multiple values in each tree node instead of just one, as the RB-Tree does. MVRB-Tree consumes less than half the memory of the RB-Tree implementation, while maintaining the original speed and balancing the tree on insertion/update. Furthermore, the MVRB-Tree allows fast retrieval and storage of nodes in persistent mode. He is a member of the Sun Microsystems JDO 1.0 Expert Group (JSR#12) and JDO 2.0 Expert Group (JSR#243) that wrote the JDO standard.