Is it possible to query neo4j for the newest nodes? In this case, the indexed property "timestamp" records time in milliseconds on every node.
All of the cypher examples I have lfound concern graph-type queries- "start at node n and follow relationships. What is the general best approach for returning resultsets sorted on one field? Is this even possible in a graph database such as node4j?
In the embedded Java API it is possible to add sorting using Lucene constructs.
http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/milestone/indexing-lucene-extras.html#indexing-lucene-query-objects
http://blog.richeton.com/2009/05/12/lucene-sort-tips/
In the server mode you can pass an ?order parameter to the lucene lookup query.
http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/milestone/rest-api-indexes.html#rest-api-find-node-by-query
Depending on how you indexed your data (not numerically as there are issues with the lucene query syntax parser and numeric searches :( ), in cypher you can do:
start n=node:myindes('time: [1 to 1000]') return n order by n.time asc
There are also more graphy ways of doing that, e.g. by linking the events with a NEXT relationship and returning the head and next n elements from this list
http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/milestone/cypher-cookbook-newsfeed.html
or to create a tree structure for time:
http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/milestone/cypher-cookbook-path-tree.html
Yes, it is possible, and there are some different ways to do so.
You could either use a timestamp property and a classic index, and sort your result set by that property. Or you could create an in-graph time-based index, like f.e. described in Peter's blog post:
http://blog.neo4j.org/2012/02/modeling-multilevel-index-in-neoj4.html
Related
Hej guys,
I'm working on some ranking related research. I would like to index a collection of documents with Lucene, take the tfidf representations (of each document) it generates, alter them, put them back into place and observe how the ranking over a fixed set of queries changes accordingly.
Is there any non-hacky way to do this?
Your question is too vague to have a clear answer, esp. on what you plan to do with :
take the tfidf representations (of each document) it generates, alter them
Lucene stores raw values for scoring :
CollectionStatistics
TermStatistics
Per term/doc pair stats : PostingsEnum
Per field/doc pair : norms
All this data is managed by lucene and will be used to compute a score for a given query term. A custom Similarity class can be used to change the formula that generates this score.
But you have to consider that a search query is made of multiple terms, and the way the scores of individual terms are combined can be changed as well. You could use existing Query classes (e.g. BooleanQuery, DisjunctionMax) but you could also write your own.
So it really depends on what you want to do with of all this but note that if you want to change the raw values stored by lucene this is going to be rather hard. You'll have to write a custom lucene codec and probably most the query stack to take benefit of your new data.
One nice thing you should consider is the possibility to store an arbitrary byte[] payloads. This way you could store a value that would have been computed outside of lucene and use it in a custom similarity or query.
Please see the following tutorials: Getting Started with Payloads and Custom Scoring with Lucene Payloads it may you give some ideas.
In my application I need a SQL-like query of the documents. The big picture is that there is a page with a paginated table showing the couchdb documents of a certain "type". I have about 15 searchable columns like timestamp, customer name, the us state, different numeric fields, etc. All of these columns are orderable, also there is a filter form allowing the user to filter by each of the fields.
For a more concrete below is a typical query which is a result by a customer setting some of the filter options and following to the second page. Its written in a pseodo-sql code, just to explain the problem:
timestamp > last_weeks_monday_epoch AND timestamp < this_weeks_monday_epoch AND marked_as_test = False AND dataspace="production" AND fico > 650
SORT BY timestamp DESC
LIMIT 15
SKIP 15
This would be a trivial problem if I were using any sql-like database, but couchdb is way more fun ;) To solve this I've created a view with the following structure of the emitted rows:
key: [field, value], id: doc._id, value: null
Now, to resolve the example query above I need to perform a bunch of queries:
{startkey: ["timestamp", last_weeks_monday_epoch], endkey: ["timestamp", this_weeks_monday_epoch]}, the *_epoch here are integers epoch timestamps,
{key: ["marked_as_test", False]},
{key: ["dataspace", "production"]},
{startkey: ["fico", 650], endkey: ["fico", {}]}
Once I have the results of the queries above I calculate intersection of the sets of document IDs and apply the sorting using the result of timestamp query. Than finally I can apply the slice resolving the document IDs of the rows 15-30 and download their content using bulk get operation.
Needless to say, its not the fastest operation. Currently the dataset I'm working with is roughly 10K documents big. I can already see that the part when I'm calculating the intersection of the sets can take like 4 seconds, obviously I need to optimize it further. I'm afraid to think, how slow its going to get in a few months when my dataset doubles, triples, etc.
Ok, so having explained the situation I'm at, let me ask the actual questions.
Is there a better, more natural way to reach my goal without loosing the flexibility of the tool?
Is the view structure I've used optimal ? At some point I was considering using a separate map() function generating the value of each field. This would result in a smaller b-trees but more work of the view server to generate the index. Can I benefit this way ?
The part of algorithm where I have to calculate intersections of the big sets just to later get the slice of the result bothers me. Its not a scalable approach. Does anyone know a better algorithm for this ?
Having map function:
function(doc){
if(doc.marked_as_test) return;
emit([doc.dataspace, doc.timestamp, doc.fico], null):
}
You can made similar request:
http://localhost:5984/db/_design/ddoc/_view/view?startkey=["production", :this_weeks_monday_epoch]&endkey=["production", :last_weeks_monday_epoch, 650]&descending=true&limit=15&skip=15
However, you should pass :this_weeks_monday_epoch and :last_weeks_monday_epoch values from the client side (I believe they are some calculable variables on database side, right?)
If you don't care about dataspace field (e.g. it's always constant), you may move it into the map function code instead of having it in query parameters.
I don't think CouchDB is a good fit for the general solution to your problem. However, there are two basic ways you can mitigate the ways CouchDB fits the problem.
Write/generate a bunch of map() functions that use each separate column as the key (for even better read/query performance, you can even do combinatoric approaches). That way you can do smart filtering and sorting, making use of a bunch of different indices over the data. On the other hand, this will cost extra disk space and index caching performance.
Try to find out which of the filters/sort orders your users actually use, and optimize for those. It seems unlikely that each combination of filters/sort orders is used equally, so you should be able to find some of the most-used patterns and write view functions that are optimal for those patterns.
I like the second option better, but it really depends on your use case. This is one of those things SQL engines have been pretty good at traditionally.
We are using Apache SOLR for full text search. We have specific requirement for sorting the search results - basically when querying for data, we need 2 sets of data - A and B, but each set should have its own sorting criteria and we cannot make 2 different calls. We can get 2 sets by using an OR condition, but how do we sort each set differently ? To illustrate, if :
Set A = {3,1,2}
Set B = {8,5,9}
So, the expected response can have set A returned in ascending order {1,2,3} but the set B can be returned in descending order {9,8,5}
I believe the default sort in SOLR will sort the entire results sets. Any suggestions or if the question is not clear,let me know.
You can possibly achieve this using FieldCollapsing
You might need to do a little more work - i.e. have a display order field(could be an integer) so that Solr knows one field that it needs to sort by.
Next you could use a query like this -
&q=*&group=true&group.field=set&group.sort=display_order
I would recommend keeping the logic such as this out of Solr, it isn't meant to be a substitute for Relational Databases, and getting it to do complex SQL like operation (while some are possible) is going to be tricky.
By the way there is an open issue in Solr's JIRA that addresses batch processing of multiple queries. Which means, when it is merged into a release, you could fire n different queries to fetch these sets in one call to Solr.
If you are keen to have SOLR perform this task for you, the patch is available in the JIRA card, you could create a build for yourself and let us all know how it goes :)
We're developing an application based on neo4j and php with about 200k nodes, which every node has a property like type='user' or type='company' to denote a specific entity of our application. We need to get the count of all nodes of a specific type in the graph.
We created an index for every entity like users, companies which holds the nodes of that property. So inside users index resides 130K nodes, and the rest on companies.
With Cypher we quering like this.
START u=node:users('id:*')
RETURN count(u)
And the results are
Returned 1 row.Query took 4080ms
The Server is configured as default with a little tweaks, but 4 sec is too for our needs. Think that the database will grow in 1 month 20K, so we need this query performs very very much.
Is there any other way to do this, maybe with Gremlin, or with some other server plugin?
I'll cache those results, but I want to know if is possible to tweak this.
Thanks a lot and sorry for my poor english.
Finaly, using Gremlin instead of Cypher, I found the solution.
g.getRawGraph().index().forNodes('NAME_OF_USERS_INDEX').query(
new org.neo4j.index.lucene.QueryContext('*')
).size()
This method uses the lucene index to get "aproximate" rows.
Thanks again to all.
Mmh,
this is really about the performance of that Lucene index. If you just need this single query most of the time, why not update an integer with the total count on some node somewhere, and maybe update that together with the index insertions, for good measure run an update with the query above every night on it?
You could instead keep a property on a specific node up to date with the number of such nodes, where updates are done guarded by write locks:
Transaction tx = db.beginTx();
try {
...
...
tx.acquireWriteLock( countingNode );
countingNode.setProperty( "user_count",
((Integer)countingNode.getProperty( "user_count" ))+1 );
tx.success();
} finally {
tx.finish();
}
If you want the best performance, don't model your entity categories as properties on the node. In stead, do it like this :
company1-[:IS_ENTITY]->companyentity
Or if you are using 2.0
company1:COMPANY
The second would also allow you automatically update your index in a separate background thread by the way, imo one of the best new features of 2.0
The first method should also proof more efficient, since making a "hop" in general takes less time than reading a property from a node. It does however require you to create a separate index for the entities.
Your queries would look like this :
v2.0
MATCH company:COMPANY
RETURN count(company)
v1.9
START entity=node:entityindex(value='company')
MATCH company-[:IS_ENTITIY]->entity
RETURN count(company)
For learning purposes I'm trying to write a simple structured document store in Redis. In my example application I'm indexing millions of documents that look a little like the following.
<book id="1234">
<title>Quick Brown Fox</title>
<year>1999</year>
<isbn>309815</isbn>
<author>Fred</author>
</book>
I'm writing a little query language that allows me to say YEAR = 1999 AND TITLE="Quick Brown Fox" (again, just for my learning, I don't care that I'm reinventing the wheel!) and this should return the ID's of the matching documents (1234 in this case). The AND and OR expressions can be arbitrarily nested.
For each document I'm generating keys as follows
BOOK_TITLE.QUICK_BROWN_FOX = 1234
BOOK_YEAR.1999 = 1234
I'm using SADD to plop these documents in a series of sets in the form KEYNAME.VALUE = { REFS }.
When I do the querying, I parse the expression into an AST. A simple expression such as YEAR=1999 maps directly to a SMEMBERS command which gets me the set of matching documents back. However, I'm not sure how to most efficiently perform the AND and OR parts.
Given a query such as:
(TITLE=Dental Surgery OR TITLE=DIY Appendectomy)
AND
(YEAR = 1999 AND AUTHOR = FOO)
I currently make the following requests to Redis to answer these queries.
-- Stage one generates the intermediate results and returns RANDOM_GENERATED_KEY3
SUNIONSTORE RANDOMLY_GENERATED_KEY1 BOOK_TITLE.DENTAL_SURGERY BOOK_TITLE.DIY_APPENDECTOMY
SINTERSTORE RANDOMLY_GENERATED_KEY2 BOOK_YEAR.1999 BOOK_YEAR.1998
SINTERSTORE RANDOMLY_GENERATED_KEY3 RANDOMLY_GENERATED_KEY1 RANDOMLY_GENERATED_KEY2
-- Retrieving the top level results just requires the last key generated
SMEMBERS RANDOMLY_GENERATED_KEY3
When I encounter an AND I use SINTERSTORE based on the two child keys (and similarly for OR I use SUNIONSTORE). I randomly generate a key to store the results in (and set a short TTL so I don't fill Redis up with cruft). By the end of this series of commands the return value is a key that I can use to retrieve the results with SMEMBERS. The reason I've used the store functions is that I don't want to transport all the matching document references back to the server, so I use temporary keys to store the result on the Redis instance and then only bring back the matching results at the end.
My question is simply, is this the best way to make use of Redis as a document store?
I'm using a similar approach with sorted sets to implement full text indexing. The overall approach is good, though there are a couple of fairly simple improvements you could make.
Rather than using randomly generated keys, you can use the query (or a short form thereof) as the key. That lets you reuse the sets that have already been calculated, which could significantly improve performance if you have queries across two large sets that are commonly combined in similar ways.
Handling title as a complete string will result in a very large number of single member sets. It may be better to index individual words in the title and filter the final results for an exact match if you really need it.