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Peter and Arjen will be at DrupalCon SF 2010. Peter specifically for the event, Arjen staying around the SF area after the MySQL Conference last week.

Specifically, we’ll be talking with people about using the OQGRAPH engine to help with social graphs and other similar problems, easily inside Drupal. You may recall that Peter already created the friendlist_graph extension for the friendlist Drupal module.

From the MySQL Conf and other earlier feedback, OQGRAPH is proving to be a real enabler. And since it’s free/GPLv2 and integrated in MariaDB 5.2, there’s generally no hindrance in starting to use it.

Walter and I are giving a tutorial on Monday morning, MySQL (and MariaDB) Dual Master Setups with MMM, I believe there are still some seats available – tutorials are a bit extra when you register for the conference, so you do need to sign up if you want to be there! It’s a hands-on tutorial/workshop, we’ll be setting up multiple clusters with dual master and the whole rest of the MMM fun, using VMs on your laptops and a separate wired network. Nothing beats messing with something live, breaking it, and seeing what happens!

Then on Tuesday afternoon (5:15pm, Ballroom F), Antony and I will do a session on the OQGRAPH engine: hierarchies/graphs inside the database made easy. If you’ve been struggling with trees in SQL, would really like to effectively use social networking in your applications, need to work with RDF datasets, or have been exploring neo4j but otherwise have everything in MySQL or MariaDB, this session is for you.

We (and a few others from OQ) will be around for the entire conference, the community dinner (Monday evening) and other social events, and are happy to answer any questions you might have. You’ll be to easily recognise us in the crowds by our distinct friendly Open Query olive green shirts (green stands out because most companies mainly use blue/grey and orange/red).

Naturally we would love to do business with you (proactive support services, OQGRAPH development), but we don’t push ourselves on to unsuitable scenarios. In fact, we’re known to refer and even actively introduce clients to competent other vendors where appropriate. In any case, it’s our pleasure and privilege to meet you!

See you all in Santa Clara in a few days.

At DrupalSouth 2010 (Wellington) after LCA2010, Peter and I implemented a Drupal module as a practical example of how the OQGRAPH engine can be used to enable social networking trickery in any website. The friendlist_graph module (available from GitHub) extends friendlist, which implements basic functionality of friends (2-way) and fans (1-way) for Drupal users.

The friendlist_graph module transposes the friendlist data using an OQGRAPH table, allowing you to query it in new and interesting ways. By adding some extra Drupal Views, it allows you to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with your Drupal users or find out how two arbitrary users are connected. It can find a path of arbitrary length near-instantly. Previously, you’d just avoid doing any such thing as it’s somewhere between impossible/limited/slow/painful in a regular relational schema.

Now think beyond: retrieve/share connections using Open Social, FOAF, Twitter/Identi.ca, logins with OpenID, and you “instantly” get a very functional social networking enabled site that does not rely on localised critical mass!

We tested with about a million users in Drupal (and approx 3.5 million random connections), which worked fine – the later demo at the DrupalSouth stuffed up because I hadn’t given the demo VM sufficient memory.

Naturally, you could do the same in Joomla! or another CMS or any site for that matter, we just happened to be at DrupalSouth so a Drupal module was the obvious choice. Take a peek at the code, it’s pretty trivial. Just make sure you run a version of MySQL that has the OQGRAPH engine, for instance 5.0.87-d10 (Sail edition!) from OurDelta.

The MySQL 5.0 and MySQL/MariaDB 5.1 source code is now also available through Launchpad. If you were waiting for a version for 5.1 and are ok with building the plugin from source, now you can!

The repo contains a subdir for examples, we’re hoping many people will contribute little snippets and scripts to import and use interesting datasets. To give you a hint, with graph capabilities you are able to deal with RDF data sources. You just need to transform the XML to say CSV, import into a suitable structure, and copy the edge information across to an OQGRAPH table.

Roland Bouman’s tree-of-life (which uses xslt stylesheets) are a good example of that approach, and was the first entry in the examples tree, including an SQL dump of the base dataset (it was CC-NC licensed) so you don’t necessarily have to fuss with the RDF/xslt foo.

Enjoy! We want to have examples/demos, a proper testsuite (there’s a bug/wishlist for that), and more. If you can help, please do: mucking around with graphs is great fun. If you implement OQGRAPH in a “proper” app, we’d also like to hear from you. The examples are intended to get people used to what OQGRAPH can do, and thus trigger ideas for practical uses. It’s not just fun. With OQGRAPH’s capabilities and speed, you can profit.

These are now available for download from

• Binary tarballs: http://master.ourdelta.org/bin/ (just 32 and 64-bit Linux at the moment)
  
• Source tarball: http://master.ourdelta.org/src/

For the GRAPH Engine documentation, see http://openquery.com/graph/doc. It’s not another general purpose engine, it’s a computation engine. Different beast altogether, but darn useful!

Since it’s new code, it’s only in the -Sail patchset (bleeding edge).

At this point we have a 32-bit and a 64-bit Linux binary tarball, should work on most Ubuntu and CentOS and the like (I tested a few). Possibly OSX coming. Not sure on Windows right now.

For further details and download links, see yesterday’s release post.

It’s time to play! A special thanks particularly to Antony Curtis for the excellent smart and actually very speedy coding, and for just being a great guy to work with. If you would like to utilise his ace MySQL knowledge and coding skills, do talk to me!

Right now, we have a source tarball available for you, patching OQGRAPH on top of a MySQL 5.0.86-d9-Sail (OurDelta) source. As you know MySQL 5.0 does not have engine plugins so patching is the only way we can put it in. This OQGRAPH codebase is licensed under GPLv2+.

Even though we’ve successfully built it on several platforms and architectures, since this is the first public release we’d like you to try it first, as we’re sure that there might be problems on some platforms. When we catch and fix those, we can do proper package builds.

You will find the link to the source tarball, and other necessarily instruction and configuration, on the documentation page. It’s tempting to skim through it and just start playing, but I recommend you really read through first: this engine is quite different. Please explore, and tell us what you think!

• http://openquery.com/graph/doc – OQGRAPH preliminary documentation
• http://openquery.com/forum/oqgraph – public forum
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/oqgraph – bug tracking, feature requests
• http://openquery.com/graph – product information, support and engineering options

To contact Open Query directly about the GRAPH engine, email g r a p h (at) o p e n q u e r y (dot) c o m