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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:

  • Unseeded queries run a GetAllElements with a configured limit applied, this limit can be configured per query or will default to 5000.
  • Gaffer graphs are readonly to Gremlin queries.
  • TinkerPop Graph Computer is not supported.
  • TinkerPop Transactions are not supported.
  • TinkerPop Lambdas are not supported.

Current known limitations or bugs:

  • Must use the GraphSON v3 format when connecting via the REST API websocket.
  • Performance compared to standard Gaffer OperationChains will likely be slower as multiple Gaffer Operations may utilised to perform one Gremlin step.
  • Edge IDs in GafferPop are not the same as in standard Gremlin. Instead of g.E(11) edge IDs take the format g.E("[source, dest]") or g.E("[source, label, dest]").
  • 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. One such use is for holding 'orphaned' vertexes, these are vertexes on an edge that do not have a Gaffer entity associated with them.
  • Chaining hasLabel() calls together like hasLabel("label1").hasLabel("label2") will act like an OR rather than an AND in standard Gremlin. This means you may get results back when you realistically shouldn't.
  • Input seeds to Gaffer operations are deduplicated. Therefore, the results of a query against a GafferPop graph may be different than a standard Gremlin graph. For example, for the Tinkerpop Modern graph: 
    (Gremlin)   g.V().out() = [v2, v3, v3, v3, v4, v5]
(GafferPop) g.V().out() = [v2, v3, v4, v5]
    In GafferPop, Vertex 3 is only found in the result set once.