What is the best way to perform soft delete in Graph database?

Question

What is the best way of implementing soft delete with timestamps( start date and end date) in Graph database?

Answer 1

Well, it's fairly straightforward to blind a traversal based on a timestamp. Take this example graph were "ts" is a mock timestamp represented as a long:

gremlin> g.addV('person').property('name','alice').as('a').
......1>   addV('person').property('name','bob').as('b').
......2>   addV('person').property('name','claire').as('c').
......3>   addE('interacted').property('ts', 125).from('a').to('b').
......4>   addE('interacted').property('ts', 126).from('a').to('b').
......5>   addE('interacted').property('ts', 127).from('a').to('b').
......6>   addE('interacted').property('ts', 126).from('b').to('c').
......7>   addE('interacted').property('ts', 150).from('b').to('c').
......8>   addE('interacted').property('ts', 151).from('a').to('b').iterate()

You can simply write your Gremlin to account for the "ts":

gremlin> yesterday = 130
==>130
gremlin> g.V().has('person','name','alice').
......1>   outE('interacted').has('ts',gt(yesterday)).inV().
......2>   values('name')
==>bob

Depending on the complexity of your requirements, adding this filter on "ts" may get burdensome and clutter your code. If that is the case, it's possible that SubgraphStrategy might help:

gremlin> sg = g.withStrategies(SubgraphStrategy.build().edges(has('ts',gt(yesterday))).create())
==>graphtraversalsource[tinkergraph[vertices:3 edges:6], standard]
gremlin> sg.V().has('person','name','alice').out('interacted').values('name')
==>bob
gremlin> g.V().has('person','name','alice').out('interacted').values('name')
==>bob
==>bob
==>bob
==>bob