ChronoGraph: A Versioned TinkerPop Graph Database

Database content versioning is an established concept in modern SQL databases, which also became part of the SQL standard in 2011. It is used in business applications to support features such as traceability of changes, auditing, historical data analysis and trend analysis. However, versioning capabilities have barely been considered outside of the relational context so far. In particular in the emerging graph technologies, these aspects are being neglected by database vendors. This paper presents ChronoGraph (This work was partially funded by the research project “txtureSA” (FWF-Project P 29022).), the first full-featured TinkerPop-compliant graph database that provides support for transparent system-time content versioning and analysis. This paper offers two key contributions: We present the concepts and architecture of ChronoGraph as a new addition to the state of the art in graph databases, and we also provide our implementation as an open-source project. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed solution, we compare it with existing, non-versioned graph databases in a controlled experiment.