Accessing graph data in Amazon Neptune
You can interact with a Amazon Neptune DB cluster after establishing network connectivity. If you have not set up access to your cluster yet, see Connect to a cluster. The following sections describe the tools and query languages you can use to load data, run queries, and manage your graph.
Tools for accessing Neptune
Neptune supports several tools for submitting queries and managing your graph data:
AWS CLI – Use the
aws neptunedatacommands to run Gremlin and openCypher queries, check engine status, manage bulk loads, and more. For more information, see neptunedata in the AWS CLI Command Reference.AWS SDKs – Use the Neptune Data API through the AWS SDKs to run queries programmatically. SDKs are available for Gremlin and openCypher.
curlandawscurl– Usecurlto submit HTTP requests directly to the Neptune endpoints. If IAM authentication is enabled, use awscurlor curl7.75.0+ with the--aws-sigv4option to sign requests. For more information, see Using awscurl with temporary credentials to securely connect to a DB cluster with IAM authentication enabled.Neptune notebooks – Use Neptune notebooks to run interactive queries in a Jupyter environment with built-in visualizations. For more information, see Using Neptune with graph notebooks.
Drivers – Connect using language-specific drivers for each query language. For Gremlin, use TinkerPop-compliant drivers available from the Apache TinkerPop project
. For openCypher, use Bolt protocol drivers as described in Using the Bolt protocol. For SPARQL, use compatible tools such as RDF4J for Java as described in Java.
Using a query language to access graph data in your Neptune DB cluster
Once you are connected, you can use the Gremlin and openCypher query languages to create and query a property graph, or the SPARQL query language to create and query a graph containing RDF data.
Graph query languages supported by Neptune
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Gremlin is a graph traversal language for property graphs. A query in Gremlin is a traversal made up of discrete steps, each of which follows an edge to a node. See Gremlin documentation at Apache TinkerPop
for more information. The Neptune implementation of Gremlin has some differences from other implementations, especially when you are using Gremlin-Groovy (Gremlin queries sent as serialized text). For more information, see Gremlin standards compliance in Amazon Neptune.
To get started, see Using Gremlin.
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openCypher is a declarative query language for property graphs that was originally developed by Neo4j, then open-sourced in 2015, and contributed to the openCypher
project under an Apache 2 open-source license. Its syntax is documented in the Cypher Query Language Reference, Version 9 . To get started, see Using openCypher.
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SPARQL is a declarative query language for RDF
data, based on the graph pattern matching that is standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and described in SPARQL 1.1 Overview and the SPARQL 1.1 Query Language specification. To get started, see Using SPARQL.
Note
You can access property graph data in Neptune using both Gremlin and openCypher, but not using SPARQL. Similarly, you can only access RDF data using SPARQL, not Gremlin or openCypher.
