Small SPARQL, RDQL, etc. Cheat Sheet

For the lack of the same, I'll put here some of my notes on SPARQL, RDQL, graph databases, and semantic web related topics in general... Will probably branch out to several pages in future, but for now, it's just a small mess.

Introduction

I'm using Redland 1.0.13, Raptor 2.0.4, and Rasqal 0.9.26 as reference implementation of SPARQL 1.0, SPARQL 1.1, and RDQL.

Basic Observations

Optimize WHERE's

Main rule of thumb I observed in many systems - try to guess what statement of the WHERE clause restricts the triplets set the most, and order the statements in increasing order of generality (most restrictive first).

For example, lets find all items that "user X" bought, that are blue. Lets presume that there are many more blue items in the DB than items that "user X" bought.

Then the query (get all things that are blue, that "user X" bought):

SELECT ?thing WHERE { ?thing _:color "blue" . "user X" _:bought ?thing }

will typically run (much) slower, than (get all things that "user X" bought, that are blue):

SELECT ?thing WHERE { "user X" _:bought ?thing . ?thing _:color "blue" }

Note that the result set is identical, but the former query first takes all the blue things and picks those bought by "user X", while the latter takes the small set of bought items and picks just the blue ones.

In general - graph databases are incredibly powerful tools, but it's up to you to make them smart!

Loading vs Insertion

In general, loading a model from a file is faster than inserting triplets one by one from code. Of course, esp. if model first loads the data and then indexes them, the gain might be significant for large(r) amounts of data.

The gain is storage and application specific - e.g. Redland library loads ~100K model 5 times faster using "hashes" storage then when adding statements one by one, but the difference becomes negligible using MySQL storage.

Turtle and SPARQL

SPARQL and Turtle share part of the syntax, and personally I prefer Turtle to other RDF syntax esp. due to this.

The following groupings of triplets make the data easier to read, and also might give good hints to query parsers, or ease up the work for RDF importers.

Grouping by same subject and predicate

:a :b :c , :d , :e .

is equivalent to

:a :b :c .
:a :b :d .
:a :b :e .

Grouping by same subject

:a :b :c ;
   :d :e .

is equivalent to

:a :b :c .
:a :d :e .