Active Orient – Introduction & Overview

How about a (fast) open source database usable without any schema, query-able with sql-statements and able to perform sophisticated graph operations? Not to forget: Easily accessible via an intuitive ruby interface. The latter is ActiveOrient.

Prerequisites

• Install the database ( Download the OpenSource Database) and assign a Username
• Make sure that ruby 2.6 is installed (via snap or rvm). Check if bundle is installed (otherwise gem install bundle)
• Clone the ActiveOrient git archive and bundle ruby libraries:

git clone https://github.com/topofocus/active-orient.git
cd active-orient
bundle install; bundle update

Now modify config/connect.yaml.
Test, development and production databases are created if they don't exist.

Then change to /bin and run

./active-orient-console -t

Simple Start

Any database-class is recognized and allocated. Further, any class created in the process is usable immediately. The behavior of any Class can be customized in model-files, which are included upon the creation of a class.

The base-classes V)ertex and E)dge are always present. Its good practice, to inherent any user-class from the base-classes.

 # create a class
    V.create_class :m   # V is the base »vertex» class. M is the vertex-class created The corresponding database-class: »m«.
 # INFO->CREATE CLASS m EXTENDS 

 # create a record
    M.create name: 'Hugo', age: 46, interests: [ 'swimming', 'biking', 'reading' ]
 # INFO->CREATE VERTEX m CONTENT {"name":"Hugo","age":46,"interests":["swimming","biking","reading"]}
    # query the database
    hugo = M.where( name: 'Hugo' ).first
    hugo.to_human
    =>"<M[177:0]: age: 46, interests: [\"swimming\", \"biking\", \"reading\"], name : Hugo>" 
    # update the dataset
    hugo.update father: M.create( name: "Volker", age: 76 )  # we create an internal link
# INFO->CREATE VERTEX m CONTENT {"name":"Volker","age":76}
# INFO->update #177:0 set father = #178:0
    hugo.to_human
    => "<M[177:0]: age : 46, father : <M[178:0]: age : 76, name : Volker>, interests : [\"swimming\", \"biking\", \"reading\"], name : Hugo>"
    hugo.father.name    
    => volker
    # change array elements
    hugo.interests << "dancing"  # --> [ 'swimming', 'biking', 'reading', 'dancing' ]
#INFO->update #177:0  set interests = interests || ['dancing'] 

    M.remove hugo 
    M.delete_class  # removes the class from OrientDB and deletes the ruby-object-definition

In this brief introduction, we created a Vertex-Class »M«. Then we created a document (record) with some properties. We queried the database using a syntax similar to ActiveRecord.
Then we created a self-refrencing link which we followed to access connected information.

At last – using the syntax of ruby-arrays – we added an entry to an embedded list. Anything without any configuration in schema-, model-files or whatsoever.

This ends Part 1 of the ActiveOrient Mini-Series.
The next part covers unidirectional links and joins, an introduction to sql-queries and their abstraction with Orientquery