Synergistic graph and SQL analytics inside IBM Db2

Abstract

To meet the challenge of analyzing rapidly growing graph and network data created by modern applications, a large number of specialized graph databases have emerged, such as Neo4j, JanusGraph, and Sqlg. At the same time, RDBMSs and SQL continue to support mission-critical business analytics. However, real-life analytical applications seldom contain only one type of analytics. They are often made of heterogeneous workloads, including SQL, machine learning, graph, and other analytics. In particular, SQL and graph analytics are usually accompanied together in one analytical workload. This means that graph and SQL analytics need to be synergistic with each other. Unfortunately, most existing graph databases are standalone and cannot easily integrate with relational databases. In addition, as a matter of fact, many graph data (data about relationships between objects or people) are already prevalent in relational databases, although they are not explicitly stored as graphs. Performing graph analytics on these relational graph data today requires exporting large amount of data to the specialized graph databases. A natural question arises: can SQL and graph analytics be performed synergistically in a same system? In this demo, we present such a working system called IBM Db2 Graph. Db2 Graph is an in-DBMS graph query approach. It is implemented as a layer inside an experimental IBM Db2™, and thus can support synergistic graph and SQL analytics efficiently. Db2 Graph employs a graph overlay approach to expose a graph view of the relational data. This approach flexibly retrofits graph queries to existing graph data stored in relational tables. We use an example scenario on health insurance claim analysis to demonstrate how Db2 Graph is used to support synergistic graph and SQL analytics inside Db2.