topic Re: Does anyone have a single example of a graphframe with two+ types of vertices? (e.g. user and post, not user to user) in Data Engineering

Does anyone have a single example of a graphframe with two+ types of vertices? (e.g. user and post, not user to user)

jonathan-dufaul — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 18:16:34 GMT

I have gone through about 75 pages and every single example has only relationships from one type of object to the same type of object. about 90% have the exact same example of "Alice Bob" "friends."

Has anyone ever made a graphframe with two types of objects. I'm fairly convinced the answer is no based off my frustrating-as-heck searching.

edit this is the example:

vertices = sqlContext.createDataFrame([

("a", "Alice", 34),

("b", "Bob", 36),

("c", "Charlie", 30),

("d", "David", 29),

("e", "Esther", 32),

("e1", "Esther2", 32),

("f", "*****", 36),

("g", "Gabby", 60),

("h", "Mark", 61),

("i", "Gunter", 62),

("j", "Marit", 63)], ["id", "name", "age"])

edges = sqlContext.createDataFrame([

("a", "b", "friend"),

("b", "a", "follow"),

("c", "a", "follow"),

("c", "f", "follow"),

("g", "h", "follow"),

("h", "i", "friend"),

("h", "j", "friend"),

("j", "h", "friend"),

("e", "e1", "friend")

], ["src", "dst", "relationship"])

g = GraphFrame(vertices, edges)

PlotGraph(g.edges)

I'm convinced nobody knows how to use graphframes beyond this stupid trivial example and this is super frustrating.

Re: Does anyone have a single example of a graphframe with two+ types of vertices? (e.g. user and post, not user to user)

-werners- — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 12:53:12 GMT

I feel your pain,

I once tried to use graphframes to flatten a complex tree, ended up using graphX (which is even worse to use but at least it is more flexible).

So maybe take a look at graphX? Beware, it is terrible to use.

I wonder what happened to making cypher (or tinkerpop or whatever) available on spark/databricks.

That being said:

Maybe you can try to put the type of object into your edges. The vertices are typeless and contain only values. The edges have a different value depending on what vertices are connected.

Re: Does anyone have a single example of a graphframe with two+ types of vertices? (e.g. user and post, not user to user)

jonathan-dufaul — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 15:32:42 GMT

I think I finally found a page that explicitly said, "no, graphframes cannot handle different types of vertices," which seems to defeat like 90% of why you would want to use a graph database/only be relevant to the most simple graph database problems.

They blamed dataframes for being so restrictive as a reason for the limitation, but, like, they chose to make this based on dataframes.

It's like group theory when I need cosets rings and ideals. I'd be ashamed publicly releasing this as and parading it as a viable product.