Graph Engine

The graph engine uses a native CSR (Compressed Sparse Row) adjacency index — not recursive JOINs. At 1 billion edges, CSR uses ~10 GB vs ~60 GB for naive adjacency lists. Sub-millisecond multi-hop traversals, 13 native algorithms, Cypher-subset pattern matching, and GraphRAG fusion.

When to Use

Knowledge graphs and entity relationships
Social networks and recommendation
Fraud detection (pattern matching)
Supply chain and dependency analysis
RAG pipelines with graph context (GraphRAG)

Graph is an Overlay

Graph edges are an overlay on document collections. Any collection can have graph edges — you don't create a separate "graph collection."

CREATE COLLECTION people;
INSERT INTO people (id, name) VALUES ('alice', 'Alice');
INSERT INTO people (id, name) VALUES ('bob', 'Bob');

GRAPH INSERT EDGE IN 'people' FROM 'alice' TO 'bob' TYPE 'knows' PROPERTIES { since: 2020, weight: 0.9 };
-- The IN '<collection>' clause is required — edges live on a named collection.

Traversal

-- BFS traversal
GRAPH TRAVERSE FROM 'alice' DEPTH 3;
GRAPH TRAVERSE FROM 'alice' DEPTH 2 LABEL 'follows' DIRECTION out;

-- Immediate neighbors
GRAPH NEIGHBORS OF 'bob' LABEL 'follows' DIRECTION both;

-- Shortest path
GRAPH PATH FROM 'alice' TO 'charlie' MAX_DEPTH 5 LABEL 'knows';

MATCH Pattern Queries

Cypher-subset pattern matching:

-- Friend-of-friend
MATCH (a:Person)-[:knows]->(b:Person)-[:knows]->(c:Person)
WHERE a.name = 'Alice'
RETURN b.name, c.name;

-- Variable-length paths
MATCH (u:User)-[:follows*2..3]->(recommended:User)
WHERE u.id = 'you'
RETURN DISTINCT recommended.id LIMIT 10;

-- Anti-join
MATCH (a:User)-[:follows]->(b:User)
WHERE NOT EXISTS { MATCH (b)-[:blocked_by]->(a) }
RETURN a.id, b.id;

-- OPTIONAL MATCH
MATCH (a:Person)-[:knows]->(b:Person)
OPTIONAL MATCH (b)-[:works_at]->(c:Company)
RETURN a.name, b.name, c.name;

13 Algorithms

GRAPH ALGO PAGERANK ON social DAMPING 0.85 ITERATIONS 20 TOLERANCE 1e-7;
GRAPH ALGO WCC ON knowledge_graph;
GRAPH ALGO SSSP ON routes FROM 'city:chicago';
GRAPH ALGO COMMUNITY ON products ITERATIONS 10 RESOLUTION 1.0;
GRAPH ALGO BETWEENNESS ON network SAMPLE 500;
GRAPH ALGO KCORE ON collaboration;
GRAPH ALGO TRIANGLES ON social MODE global;
GRAPH ALGO DIAMETER ON web;

Algorithm	Computes
PageRank	Node importance via link structure
WCC	Weakly connected components
Label Propagation	Community detection via label spreading
LCC	Local clustering coefficient
SSSP	Single-source shortest path (Dijkstra)
Betweenness	Bridge node identification
Closeness	How close a node is to all others
Harmonic	Closeness for disconnected graphs
Degree	Connection count (in/out/both)
Louvain	Community detection via modularity
Triangles	Triangle count (per-node or global)
Diameter	Longest shortest path
k-Core	Coreness decomposition

GraphRAG

Combines vector similarity with graph traversal in one query:

GRAPH RAG FUSION ON entities
  QUERY $embedding
  VECTOR_FIELD 'embedding'
  VECTOR_TOP_K 50
  EXPANSION_DEPTH 2
  EDGE_LABEL 'related_to'
  FINAL_TOP_K 10
  RRF_K (60.0, 35.0);

Vector search finds semantically similar seed nodes
BFS expands seeds along edges
RRF merges vector rank with graph hop distance