Overview

Many operations are executed on the whole graph, including the full history. This section describes how to use a GraphView to look at a subset of your data without having to re-ingest it.

A GraphView is a snapshot of a graph that is used when reading data and running algorithms. Generally, you will use a Graph object when building or mutating a graph and for global queries, but use a GraphView to extract data from specific regions of interest. You can create GraphViews using either time functions or filters to select a narrower subset of your graph. You can then run you queries against the GraphView instead of the Graph object.

Raphtory can maintain hundreds of thousands of GraphViews in parallel and allows chaining view functions together to create as specific a view as is required for your use case. A unified API means that all functions that can be called on a graph, node or edge can also be applied to this subset.

Info

This chapter will continue using the baboon graph described in the Querying Introduction.