The Von Gremlin Architecture

This article presents graphs as a universal data structure and Gremlin as a universal virtual machine for the burgeoning multi-model approach to Big Data computing. The Gremlin traversal machine is a graph-based virtual machine whose instruction set is a collection of functions called steps. A program, called a traversal, is a linear/nested composition of said steps. The fact that any database query language can compile to Gremlin bytecode and that Gremlin's memory system is a property graph composed of vertices, edges, and properties means that these database query languages are querying their respective data structure embedded within the graph. This post will present MongoDB-Gremlin which maps JSON documents to directed acyclic trees within any Apache TinkerPop™-enabled graph database and enables the user to query such graph-encoded documents using MongoDB's JSON-based CRUD language.