Assessment of Graph Databases as a Viable Materiel Solution for the Army's Dynamic Force Structure (DFS) Portal Implementation

This document summarizes the conclusions and recommendations made during the three preceding phases of the study and examines the maturity and applicability of two additional technologies, namely, 1 inverted index search engines, such as the open source implementation provided by Apache Solr and 2 key value pair data representations, such as the one used in JSON document serializations, for re-expressing the results of highly recursive SQL queries typically employed in large relational force structure data stores. The document specifically describes preliminary results showing how the combination of the two technologies mentioned above can be used to build interactive web applications that can be reliably keep the total data access and retrieval time of at 2s per query. Since graphs expressed in the form of RDF triples can be easily transformed into JSON documents and vice versa, the employment of these two technologies as part of the solution architecture for the planned Army Dynamic Force Structure portal would be complementary to the use of a graph database baseline. Rapid prototyping techniques have been applied as part of the continuing evaluation of described technologies that could complement a graph database implementation. The assessments presented in this document leverage the metrics elaborated in previous reports provided to the sponsor.