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GafferPop Limitations

There are several restrictions with the current implementation. Many of these can be attributed to the fundamental differences between the two technologies but some features may also be yet to be implemented.

Current TinkerPop features not present in the GafferPop implementation:

  • Property index for allowing unseeded queries.
  • Using a Gaffer user for authentication. Access control and authorisations are not supported as these are based on users.
  • Removal of entities/edges or properties - base Gaffer currently does not support this.
  • TinkerPop Graph Computer is not supported.
  • Graph Variables can't be updated - there is limited support for this in base Gaffer as usually requires shutting down and restarting the Graph.
  • TinkerPop Transactions are not supported.

Current known limitations or bugs:

  • The entity group id is reserved for an empty group containing only the vertex ID, this is currently used as a workaround for other limitations.
  • When you get the in or out Vertex directly off an Edge it will not contain any actual properties or be in correct group/label - it just returns a vertex in the id group. This is due to Gaffer allowing multiple entities to be associated with the source and destination vertices of an Edge.
  • Limited support for updating properties, this has partial support via Gaffer's ingest aggregation mechanism.
  • Performance compared to standard Gaffer OperationChains is hampered due to a custom TraversalStratergy not being implemented.
  • The ID of an Edge follows a specific format that is made up of its source and destination IDs like [dest, source].
  • Issues seen using hasKey() and hasValue() in same query.
  • May experience issues using the range() query function.
  • May experience issues using the where() query function.
Last update: December 19, 2023
Created: December 19, 2023