StarfishQL Concepts
Before diving into the details, it's important to grasp the following fundamental concepts in a high-level sense:
Entity
e.g. Crate
Data to be stored and processed that is meaningful in itself.
Within the database, entities can be homogeneous (as in the crates.io example, all are simply "crates") or heterogeneous (say we distinguish between "library crates" and "application crates" and represent them as different entities).
Node
e.g. serde, rand, sea-orm
An instance of an Entity.
Relation
e.g. Depends
Relation between entities. It can be directed or undirected (equivalent on both directions).1
Edge
e.g. sea-orm -depends-on-> serde
An instance of a relation. A connection between two nodes.
Graph
A data structure containing a set of nodes N and a set of edges E, where E must only use the nodes in N.
Attribute
e.g. version
Quantities (numeric, scaler values) and qualities (categorical, enum labels) attached onto each node or edge.2
Query
A description of the data we want to extract from the database.
The query result can be a graph, a vector (of nodes) or a scaler value.
Constraint
e.g. Traverse up to 3 levels deep, Only include nodes with at least 3 edges
When performing a query, the requirements of graph traversal or criteria on the topology.
Criteria
e.g. version = "0.0.1"
When performing a query, the filters applied to the nodes and edges (usually on attributes).