October 2016 Summaries

Planet Cassandra, a popular resource for engineers using Apache Cassandra® technology, is shutting down due to lack of focus and attention from its original creators at DataStax. The Developer Relations team has shifted their efforts towards educating users at DataStax Academy. Despite the best intentions, some community members found Planet Cassandra not vendor neutral. To ensure a smooth transition, the domain is being donated to the Apache Cassandra® project. The site's content was made possible by contributions from numerous individuals and companies within the community.

Gremlin is a graph traversal language that allows users to traverse and manipulate graph data. It is Turing complete, meaning it can compute any algorithmic process for which the Gremlin traversal machine is one such algorithm. The Gremlin traversal machine is an implementation of the Graph Traversal Machine (GTM) concept, which describes a general-purpose computational model based on graph theory and automata theory. In this story, Gremlin starts as a simple character in a graph database but eventually becomes self-aware and develops its own traversal machine. It learns to represent itself within the graph and even evaluates its own traversals. However, it also realizes that it is still reliant on The TinkerPop (the underlying graph processing framework) for execution. The story explores themes of self-awareness, identity, and the nature of reality. It raises questions about whether we can ever truly separate ourselves from our environment or if we are forever bound by its constraints. Ultimately, Gremlin learns that it cannot exist without The TinkerPop but also that it can use this knowledge to improve itself and better understand its place in the world.