Hi All, I'm new to OrientDB but am very interested in the technology. I'm seasoned in SQL, ETL/Data Warehousing and MOLAP but I want to break into the OrientDB/Gremlin/Tinkerpop sphere because of the potential for a much more natural graph query language(s) and particularly in integrating with dynamic graph visualization tools.
Currently I use DBVisualizer using H2 databases to store and manipulate various objects and relationships then am pushing the nodes and edges lists into a combination of tools to explore. I just thought I'd share some cool examples why in particular the JDBC driver could be a real asset - because we could push/pull data into lots of existing applications easily using this established protocol. At a minimum the ability to just insert and select records in a SQL-like fashion could provide a gradual and seamless migration path for a lot of existing use cases. I'm sure many/most are aware of these tools but I thought I'd share in case it can help anyone. These are informal/ad-hoc tools rather than full-scale application-development tools which could be coded up - but are fun for experimenting. First is y-Ed: [http://www.yworks.com/en/products/yfiles/yed/] While they sell a library they also have a free graph visualization tool to explore and do automatic layout of graphs. At first it seems you can only populate these manually but there's a trick (perhaps someone even knows a better way). If you can create an xlsx document (a little kludgy i know) with a nodes tab and and an edges tab you can go file->open and choose xlsx and map these in - then you can use the automatic layout features for hierarchical/organic/circular etc. to clean it up for printing and sharing. By being able to Query very easily using a GUI like DBVisualizer or Squirrel which then already has debuggers/CSV input/output/etc would make it MUCH easier to get started. Next is Gephi [http://gephi.github.io/] which is pretty awesome and supports a direct JDBC connection rather than having to involve an xlsx in the process. It's less pretty for printing but has powerful add-ins, queries, filters, color coding, etc for exploring graphs. Note that it uses your local video card for OpenGL rendering so you may have issues over a remote desktop or virtual machine which is why it's particularly helpful to have a network capable JDBC driver in order to populate it so you can connect to a remote database from your local desktop. It also has a cool Sigma.js exporter which will export a standalone, interactive web page/site that can be easily distributed. Be sure to use firefox though because Chrome has an security feature that disables local javascript (but there are command line options I believe to enable this). Cytoscape and others also provide JDBC connections for loading data but there are much steeper learning curves for these. There are of course many, many others - particularly javascript libraries but they're more involved to code up and are often slow with larger graphs - here's a good list of them http://www.idea.org/blog/2012/10/25/great-tools-for-data-visualization/ Sorry for the long post but I'm also curious to know what other people are doing. Cheers, Kevin -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OrientDB" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
