Polypheny is a multi-model database management system (DBMS) designed for efficiently processing complex queries across large and heterogeneous datasets. Build according to the architectural concept of a polystore system, Polypheny employs highly optimized databases as execution engines. The result is a system capable of handling not just structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data but also ensuring efficient processing of mixed workloads.
What is Polypheny?
Polypheny is a powerful, flexible DBMS optimized to support a wide variety of data-intensive applications such as data analytics and machine learning. It offers the capabilities to efficiently manage heterogeneous data while maintaining high performance. Key advantages of Polypheny include its ability to handle a wide range of data types, data models, queries, and workloads, integrate data from various sources, and access data through multiple industry-standard interfaces.
Moreover, Polypheny comes with an intuitive and powerful browser-based user interface, enabling not only the management and monitoring of the Polypheny system but also the management of data, schema, and querying of data.
Key Features
Multi-Model Data Management
Polypheny supports multiple data models including relational, document, and graph models, enabling seamless integration of heterogeneous data from various sources. With Polypheny, users can execute cross-model queries, enabling tighter integration and harvesting the benefits of each data model.
- Relational Model: This represents data as a collection of tables with fixed columns and enables expressing relationships using foreign keys.
- Document Model: This model excels at storing loosely structured and unstructured data, organized as collections of documents. Each document can have an arbitrary, deeply-nested structure.
- Graph Model: Excellent for encoding relationship information, the graph model organizes data as nodes connected by edges. Both nodes and edges can possess labels and a set of arbitrary key-value pairs. Polypheny supports the powerful Label-Property-Graphs (LPG) model.
Query Languages
Polypheny supports querying data using various languages independent of the data model, with automatic semantic preserving mapping between data models.
- SQL: The SQL dialect in Polypheny adheres to the industry standard for querying relational databases and is equipped with a large set of supported query and aggregation functions.
- MongoQL: An efficient language for retrieving document-based data. The implementation closely follows the MongoDB standard.
- Cypher: This is a declarative graph query language for property graphs, with an implementation that closely adheres to the openCypher standard.
- CQL: Contextual Query Language is primarily used to query bibliographic catalogs and museum collection information.
- Pig: This language was designed for writing programs running on Apache Hadoop, but it is also powerful for writing analytical query scripts in a structured manner.
Central Data Platform
Polypheny can integrate with various projects and environments using provided drivers and connectors, such as JDBC, RESTful API, Python, and HTTP API, promoting seamless integration.
Scalable and Efficient Storage
Polypheny supports several well-known and highly optimized database systems for storing data. Its inherently distributed architecture allows for easy horizontal scaling and thus, processing huge amounts of data. Polypheny’s scalable, flexible, and efficient design is capable of handling modern data-intensive applications’ demands.
Query Optimization and Execution
Polypheny includes a query optimizer and execution engine that executes queries over the stored data, combining the advantages of highly optimized data stores and its ability to efficiently accommodate and process multiple data models. It employs various techniques such as cost-based optimization and rule-based optimization to choose the most efficient execution plan for each query, with caching support for frequently used query plans.
Mapping and Cross-Model Queries
A unique feature of Polypheny is its seamless mapping between different data models. This enables all data to be queried using all supported query languages, independent of the data model. This mapping capability extends to underlying data stores, allowing every data store to serve as storage and execution engine.
Use Cases and Applications
Polypheny is suitable for a wide range of data-intensive applications, such as data analytics, machine learning, data integration, and multimedia retrieval.
- Data Analytics: Polypheny enables real-time querying across the entire data lake, including static data sources like CSV or Excel files, which can be processed without prior import.
- Machine Learning: Its ability to accommodate and combine data represented according to different data models makes Polypheny an excellent choice for machine learning applications.
- Data Integration: Polypheny enables data previously stored in disjoint databases to be maintained in one database system with minimal changes to the applications, leading to tighter data integration.
- Multimedia Retrieval: Polypheny natively handles multimedia data and supports typical retrieval functions like nearest-neighbor search, making it an excellent choice for multimedia retrieval systems.
Polypheny’s efficient query processing capabilities make it a compelling choice for managing modern data-intensive workloads. The system’s performance, scalability, and versatility underscore its readiness to meet the demands of contemporary data-intensive applications.
Who Can Use Polypheny?
Polypheny is ideal for data professionals, developers, data scientists, and organizations that deal with diverse data models and large amounts of data. It’s also an excellent tool for researchers and educators in the fields of databases and distributed systems. Its unique combination of multiple data access models and scalability features make it an essential tool for modern data-driven applications.
What You Will Find in this Documentation
In the sections that follow, you will find a detailed guide to setting up Polypheny, understanding its architecture, and using it to perform various data tasks. We will also explore advanced features and provide comprehensive references to help you exploit the full potential of Polypheny. The documentation is organized into easy-to-follow steps and includes practical examples and tips to make your learning journey smoother.
Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced database professional, this guide will help you to quickly get started with Polypheny. Welcome aboard, and let’s embark on this data journey together!
