I found myself wondering around the Microsoft Research website the other day and found the Trinity project. Trinity is a graph database and computation platform over distributed memory cloud. Trinity currently have a release package of version 0.2 available for download. If you want to find out some more details visit the official site: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trinity/default.aspx
Key features of Trinity
- Use Hypergraph Data Model
- Distributed: Deployed to one more machines
- Memory-based graph store with rich database features.
- Highly Concurrent Online Query processing
- ACI transaction support
- Parallel graph processing system
The Interest
I never really took notice until I read through the documentation and understand the practical usage. Graph databases are used by all the big companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook. A Graph database is a database that uses graph structures with nodes, edges and properties to represent and store information.
On Wikipedia you will find a whole list of Graph databases implementations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database
Where to know
You might ask yourself why do I write this entry about Trinity. Well, for starters all developers that use any Microsoft technology should take note of Trinity. Trinity can help to better structure information on your next project. I can see how Trinity can be used along side SharePoint and SQL Server. It would be interesting to see how you may be able to take existing SQL Server data to Trinity. I could also see how BI developers can take various data sources and structure the data inside Trinity to do their magic easier. I also believe that Trinity might be the solution service on Azure for graph database usage.
Since I’m a service integration person, I find it difficult to think how this will benefit any service integration project or be used along side BizTalk. I might be wrong?
I think Trinity has a bright future ahead. Hope Microsoft does not kill off this research project. Let me know what you think about graph databases and specifically the Trinity project.
Cheerio!
