Extending the Integrity Constraint Support in a Graph Database

The large volume of data that has been produced every day has encouraged the development of new data storage technologies, including graph databases, which have experienced a growing adoption rate in recent years. Graph databases allow better data modeling for some applications and provide better performance on the query processing. On the other hand, the graph database management systems that are commercially available nowadays still lack means to ensure the consistency of stored data. The mechanisms for defining integrity constraints in graph databases are quite simple or in many cases nonexistent. In this scenario, this work proposes the extension of a graph database management system in order to add support for the definition of more elaborate integrity constraints, which will be verified whenever the data is modified. These integrity constraints can be defined to prevent a graph from showing an inconsistent state and, therefore, compromise the operation of applications that depend on the information it represents.