I'm doing some stuff with my University and I've been asked to create a system that builds Complete Trees with millions of nodes (1 or 2 million at least).
I was trying to create the Tree with a Load CSV Using a periodic commit and it worked well with the creation of just Nodes (70000 ms on a general purpose Notebook :P ). When I tried the same with the Edges, it didn't scale as well.
Using periodic commit LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM 'file:///Archi.csv' AS line
Merge (:Vertex {name:line.from})<-[:EDGE {attr1: toFloat(line.attr1), attr2:toFloat(line.attr2), attr3: toFloat(line.attr3), attr4: toFloat(line.attr4), attr5: toFloat(line.attr5)}]-(:Vertex {name:line.to})
I need to guarantee that a Tree is generated in no more than 5 minutes.
Is there a Faster method that can return such a performances?
P.S. : The task doesn't expect to use Neo4j, but just a Database (either SQL or NoSQL), but I found out this NoSQL Graph DB and I thought would be nice to implement with Neo4j as the graph data structure is given for free.
P.P.S : I'm using Cypher
I think you should read up on MERGE in the developer documentation again, to make sure you understand exactly what it's doing.
A few things in particular to be aware of...
If the pattern you are merging does not exist, all elements of the pattern will be merged, which could result in duplicate :Vertex nodes being created. If your :Vertexes are supposed to be in the database already, and if there are no relationships yet, and if you are sure that no relationship repeats itself in your CSV, I strongly urge you to MATCH on the start and end nodes, and then CREATE the relationship between them instead of the MERGE. Remember that doing a MERGE with a relationship with many attributes means it will try to match on that first, so as the number of relationships grow between nodes, there will be an increasing number of comparisons, which will slow your query down further. CREATE is a better choice if you know that no relationship will be duplicated, and if you are sure those relationships don't exist yet.
I also urge you to create an index on :Vertex(name), as that will significantly help matching on end nodes.
Related
I have a single csv file whose contents are as follows -
id,name,country,level
1,jon,USA,international
2,don,USA,national
3,ron,USA,local
4,bon,IND,national
5,kon,IND,national
6,jen,IND,local
7,ken,IND,international
8,ben,GB,local
9,den,GB,international
10,lin,GB,national
11,min,AU,national
12,win,AU,local
13,kin,AU,international
14,bin,AU,international
15,nin,CN,national
16,con,CN,local
17,eon,CN,international
18,fon,CN,international
19,pon,SZN,national
20,zon,SZN,international
First of all I created a constraint on id
CREATE CONSTRAINT idConstraint ON (n:Name) ASSERT n.id IS UNIQUE
Then I created nodes for name, then for country and finally for level as follows -
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:///demo.csv" AS row
MERGE (name:Name {name: row.name, id: row.id, country:row.country, level:row.level})
MERGE (country:Country {name: row.country})
MERGE (level:Level {type: row.level})
I can see the nodes fine. However, I want to be able to query for things like, for a given country how many names are there? For a given level, how many countries and then how many names for that country are there?
So for that I need to make Relationships between the nodes.
For that I tried like this -
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:///demo.csv" AS row
MATCH (n:Name {name:row.name}), (c:Country {name:row.country})
CREATE (n)-[:LIVES_IN]->(c)
RETURN n,c
However this gives me a warning as follows -
This query builds a cartesian product between disconnected patterns.
If a part of a query contains multiple disconnected patterns, this will build a cartesian product between all those parts. This may produce a large amount of data and slow down query processing. While occasionally intended, it may often be possible to reformulate the query that avoids the use of this cross product, perhaps by adding a relationship between the different parts or by using OPTIONAL MATCH (identifier is: (c))
Moreover the resulting Graph looks slightly wrong - each Name node has 2 relations with a country whereas I would think there would be only one?
I also have a nagging fear that I am not doing things in an optimized or correct way. This is just a demo. In my real dataset, I often cannot run multiple CREATE or MERGE statements together. I have to LOAD the same CSV file again and again to do pretty much everything from creating nodes. When creating relationships, because a cartesian product forms, the command basically gives Java Heap Memory error.
PS. I just started with neo4j yesterday. I really don't know much about it. I have been struggling with this for a whole day, hence thought of asking here.
You can ignore the cartesian product warning, since that exact approach is needed in order to create the relationships that form the patterns you need.
As for the multiple relationships, it's possible you may have run the query twice. The second run would have created the duplicate relationships. You could use MERGE instead of CREATE for the relationships, that would ensure that there would be no duplicates.
I'm trying to improve a fraud detection system for a commerce website. We deal with direct bank transactions, so fraud is a risk we need to manage. I recently learned of graphing databases and can see how it applies to these problems. So, over the past couple of days I set up neo4j and parsed our data into it: example
My intuition was to create a node for each order, and a node for each piece of data associated with it, and then connect them all together. Like this:
MATCH (w:Wallet),(i:Ip),(e:Email),(o:Order)
WHERE w.wallet="ex" AND i.ip="ex" AND e.email="ex" AND o.refcode="ex"
CREATE (w)-[:USED]->(o),(i)-[:USED]->(o),(e)-[:USED]->(o)
But this query runs very slowly as the database size increases (I assume because it needs to search the whole data set for the nodes I'm asking for). It also takes a long time to run a query like this:
START a=node(179)
MATCH (a)-[:USED*]-(d)
WHERE EXISTS(d.refcode)
RETURN distinct d
This is intended to extract all orders that are connected to a starting point. I'm very new to Cypher (<24 hours), and I'm finding it particularly difficult to search for solutions.
Are there any specific issues with the data structure or queries that I can address to improve performance? It ideally needs to complete this kind of thing within a few seconds, as I'd expect from a SQL database. At this time we have about 17,000 nodes.
Always a good idea to completely read through the developers manual.
For speeding up lookups of nodes by a property, you definitely need to create indexes or unique constraints (depending on if the property should be unique to a label/value).
Once you've created the indexes and constraints you need, they'll be used under the hood by your query to speed up your matches.
START is only used for legacy indexes, and for the latest Neo4j versions you should use MATCH instead. If you're matching based upon an internal id, you can use MATCH (n) WHERE id(n) = xxx.
Keep in mind that you should not persist node ids outside of Neo4j for lookup in future queries, as internal node ids can be reused as nodes are deleted and created, so an id that once referred to a node that was deleted may later end up pointing to a completely different node.
Using labels in your queries should help your performance. In the query you gave to find orders, Neo4j must inspect every end node in your path to see if the property exists. Property access tends to be expensive, especially when you're using a variable-length match, so it's better to restrict the nodes you want by label.
MATCH (a)-[:USED*]-(d:Order)
WHERE id(a) = 179
RETURN distinct d
On larger graphs, the variable-length match might start slowing down, so you may get more performance by installing APOC Procedures and using the Path Expander procedure to gather all subgraph nodes and filter down to just Order nodes.
MATCH (a)
WHERE id(a) = 179
CALL apoc.path.expandConfig(a, {bfs:true, uniqueness:"NODE_GLOBAL"}) YIELD path
RETURN LAST(NODES(path)) as d
WHERE d:Order
I am merging large batches of ~500,000 relationships with the LOAD CSV command:
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM 'http://file.csv'
MATCH (a:Label {uid: csv.uid1}),(b:Otherlabel {uid: csv.uid2})
MERGE (a)-[:TYPE {key1: csv.key1}]->(b)
Both uid properties have a UNIQUE constraint.
The CSV file looks like:
uid1,uid2,key1
123,abc,some_value
456,def,some_value
This is usually very fast (< 1 min) when there are many different nodes on each side.
But performance drops dramatically when I load batches where a single a node is connected to many different b nodes. The uid1 is always the same but schema constraints are still there. ~30,000 relationships take ~8 min to load.
Am I missing something here? What could explain the huge performance difference in MERGEing 'many-to-many' relationships vs. 'one-to-many'?
As I mentioned in the comment on the question, I verified this behavior with a ~300,000 line CSV file that I created with unique random values for uid1 and uid2. #MartinPreusse then mentioned that if you change the query to use CREATE instead of MERGE, the query is fast. This observation made me realize what is going on.
The slowdown is caused by the need to scan the relationships list of the 'a' node each time a MERGE is performed. When a CREATE is performed, the relationship is added without testing first to see if the relationship already exists. When the relationship lists remain short (first case), scanning the relationship lists has little impact. When the relationship lists are growing long (second case), the repeated scanning of a growing list is dominating the process. In my test I linked all 300,000 nodes to a single node using a MERGE clause and it took hours.
If you don't have to worry about creating duplicate relationships, you can use CREATE without fear. Even if duplicates are an issue, it might be faster to use CREATE and then craft a query that will remove the duplicates.
We are working on a system where users can define their own nodes and connections, and can query them with arbitrary queries. A user can create a "branch" much like in SCM systems and later can merge back changes into the main graph.
Is it possible to create an efficient data model for that in Neo4j? What would be the best approach? Of course we don't want to duplicate all the graph data for every branch as we have several million nodes in the DB.
I have read Ian Robinson's excellent article on Time-Based Versioned Graphs and Tom Zeppenfeldt's alternative approach with Network versioning using relationnodes but unfortunately they are solving a different problem.
I Would love to know what you guys think, any thoughts appreciated.
I'm not sure what your experience level is. Any insight into that would be helpful.
It would be my guess that this system would rely heavily on tags on the nodes. maybe come up with 5-20 node types that are very broad, including the names and a few key properties. Then you could allow the users to select from those base categories and create their own spin-offs by adding tags.
Say you had your basic categories of (:Thing{Name:"",Place:""}) and (:Object{Category:"",Count:4})
Your users would have a drop-down or something with "Thing" and "Object". They'd select "Thing" for instance, and type a new label (Say "Cool"), values for "Name" and "Place", and add any custom properties (IsAwesome:True).
So now you've got a new node (:Thing:Cool{Name:"Rock",Place:"Here",IsAwesome:True}) Which allows you to query by broad categories or a users created categories. Hopefully this would keep each broad category to a proportional fraction of your overall node count.
Not sure if this is exactly what you're asking for. Good luck!
Hmm. While this isn't insane, think about the type of system you're replacing first. SQL. In SQL databases you wouldn't use branches because it's data storage. If you're trying to get data from multiple sources into one DB, I'd suggest exporting them all to CSV files and using a MERGE statement in cypher to bring them all into your DB at once.
This could manifest similar to branching by having each person run a script on their own copy of the DB when you merge that takes all the nodes and edges in their copy and puts them all into a CSV. IE
MATCH (n)-[:e]-(n2)
RETURN n,e,n2
Then comparing these CSV's as you pull them into your final DB to see what's already there from the other copies.
IMPORT CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:\\YourFile.CSV" AS file
MERGE (N:Node{Property1:file.Property1, Property2:file.Property2})
MERGE (N2:Node{Property1:file.Property1, Property2:file.Property2})
MERGE (N)-[E:Edge]-(N2)
This will work, as long as you're using node types that you already know about and each person isn't creating new data structures that you don't know about until the merge.
I am trying to build an database in Neo4j with a structure that contains seven different types of nodes, in total around 4-5000 nodes and between them around 40000 relationships. The cypher code i am currently using is that i first create the nodes with the code:
Create (node1:type {name:'example1', type:'example2'})
Around 4000 of that example with unique nodes.
Then I've got relationships stated as such:
Create
(node1)-[:r]-(node51),
(node2)-[:r]-(node5),
(node3)-[:r]-(node2);
Around 40000 of such unique relationships.
With smaller scale graphs this has not been any problem at all. But with this one, the Executing query never stops loading.
Any suggestions on how I can make this type of query work? Or what i should do instead?
edit. What I'm trying to build is a big graph over a product, with it's releases, release versions, features etc. in the same way as the Movie graph example is built.
The product has about 6 releases in total, each release has around 20 releaseversion. In total there is 371 features and of there 371 features there is also 438 featureversions. ever releaseversion (120 in total) then has around 2-300 featureversions each. These Featureversions are mapped to its Feature whom has dependencies towards a little bit of everything in the db. I have also involed HW dependencies such as the possible hw to run these Features on, releases on etc. so basicaly im using cypher code such as:
Create (Product1:Product {name:'ABC', type:'Product'})
Create (Release1:Release {name:'12A', type:'Release'})
Create (Release2:Release {name:'13A, type:'release'})
Create (ReleaseVersion1:ReleaseVersion {name:'12.0.1, type:'ReleaseVersion'})
Create (ReleaseVersion2:ReleaseVersion {name:'12.0.2, type:'ReleaseVersion'})
and below those i've structured them up using
Create (Product1)<-[:Is_Version_Of]-(Release1),
(Product1)<-[:Is_Version_Of]-(Release2),
(Release2)<-[:Is_Version_Of]-(ReleaseVersion21),
All the way down to features, and then I've also added dependencies between them such as:
(Feature1)-[:Requires]->(Feature239),
(Feature239)-[:Requires]->(Feature51);
Since i had to find all this information from many different excel-sheets etc, i made the code this way thinking i could just put it together in one mass cypher query and run it on the /browser on the localhost. it worked really good as long as i did not use more than 4-5000 queries at a time. Then it created the entire database in about 5-10 seconds at maximum, but now when I'm trying to run around 45000 queries at the same time it has been running for almost 24 hours, and are still loading and saying "executing query...". I wonder if there is anyway i can improve the time it takes, will the database eventually be created? or can i do some smarter indexes or other things to improve the performance? because by the way my cypher is written now i cannot divide it into pieces since everything in the database has some sort of connection to the product. Do i need to rewrite the code or is there any smooth way around?
You can create multiple nodes and relationships interlinked with a single create statement, like this:
create (a { name: "foo" })-[:HELLO]->(b {name : "bar"}),
(c {name: "Baz"})-[:GOODBYE]->(d {name:"Quux"});
So that's one approach, rather than creating each node individually with a single statement, then each relationship with a single statement.
You can also create multiple relationships from objects by matching first, then creating:
match (a {name: "foo"}), (d {name:"Quux"}) create (a)-[:BLAH]->(d);
Of course you could have multiple match clauses, and multiple create clauses there.
You might try to match a given type of node, and then create all necessary relationships from that type of node. You have enough relationships that this is going to take many queries. Make sure you've indexed the property you're using to match the nodes. As your DB gets big, that's going to be important to permit fast lookup of things you're trying to create new relationships off of.
You haven't specified which query you're running that isn't "stopping loading". Update your question with specifics, and let us know what you've tried, and maybe it's possible to help.
If you have one of the nodes already created then a simple approach would be:
MATCH (n: user {uid: "1"}) CREATE (n) -[r: posted]-> (p: post {pid: "42", title: "Good Night", msg: "Have a nice and peaceful sleep.", author: n.uid});
Here the user node already exists and you have created a new relation and a new post node.
Another interesting approach might be to generate your statements directly in Excel, see http://blog.bruggen.com/2013/05/reloading-my-beergraph-using-in-graph.html?view=sidebar for an example. You can run a lot of CREATE statements in one transaction, so this should not be overly complicated.
If you're able to use the Neo4j 2.1 prerelease milestones, then you should try using the new LOAD CSV and PERIODIC COMMIT features. They are designed for just this kind of use case.
LOAD CSV allows you to describe the structure of your data with one or more Cypher patterns, while providing the values in CSV to avoid duplication.
PERIODIC COMMIT can help make large imports more reliable and also improve performance by reducing the amount of memory that is needed.
It is possible to use a single cypher query to create a new node as well as relate it to an existing now.
As an example, assume you're starting with:
an existing "One" node which has an "id" property "1"
And your goal is to:
create a second node, let's call that "Two", and it should have a property id:"2"
relate the two nodes together
You could achieve that goal using a single Cypher query like this:
MATCH (one:One {id:'1'})
CREATE (one) -[:RELATED_TO]-> (two:Two {id:'2'})