On graph query optimization in large networks

The dramatic proliferation of sophisticated networks has resulted in a growing need for supporting effective querying and mining methods over such large-scale graph-structured data. At the core of many advanced network operations lies a common and critical graph query primitive: how to search graph structures efficiently within a large network? Unfortunately, the graph query is hard due to the NP-complete nature of subgraph isomorphism. It becomes even challenging when the network examined is large and diverse. In this paper, we present a high performance graph indexing mechanism, SPath, to address the graph query problem on large networks. SPath leverages decomposed shortest paths around vertex neighborhood as basic indexing units, which prove to be both effective in graph search space pruning and highly scalable in index construction and deployment. Via SPath, a graph query is processed and optimized beyond the traditional vertex-at-a-time fashion to a more efficient path-at-a-time way: the query is first decomposed to a set of shortest paths, among which a subset of candidates with good selectivity is picked by a query plan optimizer; Candidate paths are further joined together to help recover the query graph to finalize the graph query processing. We evaluate SPath with the state-of-the-art GraphQL on both real and synthetic data sets. Our experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of SPath, which proves to be a more practical and efficient indexing method in addressing graph queries on large networks.