SQL2Neo: A SQL Access Interface to Neo4j

• Pablo Vicente Passos Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC)
• Lucas Santos de Oliveira Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC)
• Geomar André Schreiner Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) / Federal University of South Border (UFFS) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6457-8982
• Vanessa Lago Machado Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) / Federal Institute Sul-Rio-Grandense (IFSul) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0406-5907
• Ronaldo dos Santos Mello Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4262-5474

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbbd.2023.232478

Abstract

With the increasing need of several applications to continuously and quickly manipulate large data volumes, NoSQL Database (DB) raises as a good choice. In a scenario where applications intend to migrate relational data to NoSQL DBs, developers are challenged to deal with different access languages or methods, as well as different DB technologies. Given this context, we propose a solution for mapping the traditional SQL access interface to graph-oriented NoSQL DBs access interface with focus on Neo4j DB system. Different from related work, our proposal accomplishes the mapping of the main SQL DDL/DML instructions to the Cypher language of Neo4j. We also present mapping rules between relational and graph-oriented data models. Experiments demonstrate that our solution is viable and allows data manipulation in Neo4j without the need to modify the SQL access interface to Cypher by the application.

Keywords: SQL, NoSQL, graph-oriented databases, Neo4j, relational-to-graph mapping

References

Abadi, D. (2009). Data Management in the Cloud: Limitations and Opportunities. IEEE Data Eng. Bull., 32:3–12.

Alotaibi, O. and Pardede, E. (2019). Transformation of Schema from Relational Database (RDB) to NoSQL Databases. Data, 4(4):148.

Boudaoud, A. et al. (2022). Towards a Complete Direct Mapping from Relational Databases to Property Graphs. In 11th Int. Conference on Model and Data Engineering (MEDI), volume 13761 of LNCS, pages 222–235. Springer.

Gueidi, A. et al. (2021). Towards Unified Modeling for NoSQL Solution Based on Mapping Approach. In Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Inf. & Eng. Systems (KES), volume 192 of Procedia Computer Science, pages 3637–3646. Elsevier.

Li, S. et al. (2021). SQL2Cypher: Automated Data and Query Migration from RDBMS to GDBMS. In 22nd Int. Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE), Proceedings, Part II, volume 13081 of LNCS, pages 510–517. Springer.

Megid, Y. A. et al. (2018). Using Functional Dependencies in Conversion of Relational Databases to Graph Databases. In 29th Int. Conf. on DB and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA), Proceedings, Part II, volume 11030 of LNCS, pages 350–357. Springer.

Orel, O. et al. (2017). Property Oriented Relational-To-Graph Database Conversion. Automatika, 57(3):836–845.

Sadalage, P. J. and Fowler, M. (2012). NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence. Pearson Education.

Sayeb, Y. et al. (2017). From Relational Database to Big Data: Converting Relational to Graph Database, MOOC Database as Example. J. Ubiquitous Syst. Pervasive Networks, 8(2):15–20.

Schreiner, G. A., Duarte, D., and dos Santos Mello, R. (2020). Bringing SQL Databases to Keybased NoSQL Databases: A Canonical Approach. Computing, 102(1):221–246.

Stoica, R. et al. (2019). On Directly Mapping Relational Databases to Property Graphs. In 13th Alberto Mendelzon Int. Workshop on Foundations of Data Management (AMW), volume 2369 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. CEUR-WS.org.

Virgilio, R. D. et al. (2013). Converting Relational to Graph Databases. In 1st Int. SIGMOD/PODS Workshop on Graph Data Management Experiences and Systems (GRADES), pages 1–6. ACM.