Using Functional Dependencies in Conversion of Relational Databases to Graph Databases

Graph database management systems are widely used in scenarios where the data are intensively connected. Handling such connected data in a relational database is not an efficient task. Converting relational databases to graph ones is one of the solutions that can empower users with handling such data using the graph model features. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to ease such conversion and overcome the limitations of the existing algorithms. The state of the art algorithms cannot handle multiple relationships types such as unary relationships and associative entities with non-foreign key attributes. Our proposed algorithm, FD2G, leverages the existence of functional dependencies information inside the input relational database to automatically perform the conversion to property graph databases. In addition, we updated the state of the art algorithm, named R2G, to handle its limitations and be able to fairly compare both algorithms performance. We evaluated FD2G against the updated R2G algorithm where it efficiently and effectively outperformed the existing one.