[ANN] 4store version 1.0.0

[Steve Harris-11]

Garlik is pleased to announce the release of 4store version 1.0.0.

For more information see http://4store.org/
Download source and Mac OS X binaries from http://4store.org/download/

4store is a RDF store that have been developed by Garlik (http://www.garlik.com/ 
) over the last four years to support their online products. It loads  
RDF in a variety of syntaxes and answers SPARQL queries  over HTTP.  
4store specialises in storing large quantities of RDF, and can be run  
on clusters of UNIX machines.

4store is written in C, and is portable to most Linux distributions  
and Mac OS X. It's also known to run on other UNIX systems with some  
modifications.

Documentation is available at http://4store.org/trac/wiki/Documentation

Help and support can be obtained at http://groups.google.com/group/4store-support
and with IRC on #4store at irc.freenode.net.

- Steve

--
Steve Harris
Garlik Limited, 2 Sheen Road, Richmond, TW9 1AE, UK
[phone]  http://www.garlik.com/
Registered in England and Wales 535 7233 VAT # 849 0517 11
Registered office: Thames House, Portsmouth Road, Esher, Surrey, KT10  
9AD

[Sandro Hawke]

> Garlik is pleased to announce the release of 4store version 1.0.0.
>
> For more information see http://4store.org/

Congratulations!   It looks like a really nice bit of work.

I haven't really followed the state of the art in quad-store
benchmarking.  The ESW page isn't totally stale, but it's not that fresh
either [1].  Do you have any figures that are worth sharing?

I'm particularly interested in small & fast queries, for little web
apps.  My intuition is that something based on SQLite would be faster
for the small stuff, since there's no need for IPC.  But, of course,
intuition on such things isn't good for much more than coming up with
good questions to ask.

    -- Sandro

[1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfStoreBenchmarking

[Steve Harris-11]

Apologies for messing up threading, this mail didn't get through to me  
for some reason, I found it in the archives by chance.

> > Garlik is pleased to announce the release of 4store version 1.0.0.
> >
> > For more information see http://4store.org/
>
> Congratulations!   It looks like a really nice bit of work.
>
> I haven't really followed the state of the art in quad-store
> benchmarking.  The ESW page isn't totally stale, but it's not that  
> fresh
> either [1].  Do you have any figures that are worth sharing?
>
> I'm particularly interested in small & fast queries, for little web
> apps.  My intuition is that something based on SQLite would be faster
> for the small stuff, since there's no need for IPC.  But, of course,
> intuition on such things isn't good for much more than coming up with
> good questions to ask.

Our experience is that this approach of running SPARQL queries over  
HTTP is easily fast enough to support that kind of query.

For example the page at http://foaf.qdos.com/find/?q=timbl%40w3.org is  
built entirely from SPARQL queries over a FOAF KB (without something  
like 10M FOAF files in it), and requires several dozen SPARQL  
queries*, some of which are very complicated, but it generates the  
HTML in about .4 of a second. I'd be happy to share the exact queries  
that are run in the creation of this page offlist, but they're pretty  
bulky. They have to do the IFP joining up for all the foaf:knows  
people, so you can imagine that there's quite a few, and they're  
extremely complex.

3rd parties are currently working on benchmarks of 4store, we have  
internal benchmarks, but those wouldn't really be meaningful to anyone  
else at the moment, though we might consider publishing them at some  
point in the future - they cover ground that's not really captured by  
existing benchmarks.

Anecdotally I would say that the query performance is at on-par with  
other stores, and import performance is somewhat higher, but I'm not  
up to speed with current developments. Per-query, and per-data  
performance in RDF stores seems to vary substantially in SPARQL  
systems. We look forward to seeing some public benchmark results.

* There would be fewer queries, but it's built on SPARQL 1.0, which  
has no aggregates.

- Steve
> [1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfStoreBenchmarking
--
Steve Harris
Garlik Limited, 2 Sheen Road, Richmond, TW9 1AE, UK
[phone]  http://www.garlik.com/
Registered in England and Wales 535 7233 VAT # 849 0517 11
Registered office: Thames House, Portsmouth Road, Esher, Surrey, KT10  
9AD