What is Gaffer?

Gaffer is a graph database framework, it acts similarly to an interface providing a graph data structure on top of a chosen storage technology to enable storage of large graphs and traversal of it's entities and edges. In a nutshell Gaffer allows you to take data, convert it into a graph, store it in a database and then run queries and analytics on it.

The high level interactions of loading data and querying are demonstrated in the diagrams below.

flowchart TD
    subgraph Graph Query
        G{{Schema}} -.-> F
        F([Query]) ---> H(Gaffer)
        J(key-value store) <--> H
        H --> K([Result])
    end
    subgraph Data Input
        A(Data)-->B{{Schema}}
        B --> C(Gaffer)
        C --> D(key-value store)
    end

Note

Knowledge of the Gaffer schema in use is usually required to formulate a graph query, but doesn't form part of the query itself - hence the dotted connection.

Why would you want to use Gaffer?

Conceptually a graph database/data platform can have a large variety of uses where it'll provide specific advantages over other data storage/analytic platforms which is discussed in the "What is Graph?" section of these docs. Gaffer provides an extensible and straightforward way to insert, manage and query the graph data stored in the underlying storage systems (ie. Accumulo).

Gaffer also has some key features not always found in other graph database technologies, including but not limited to:

• Aggregation.
• Fine grained security.
• Graph Federation.

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Last update: December 1, 2023
Created: September 13, 2023