There is a lot of documentation available for the Apache TinkerPop™ graph computing framework. There is the project’s Reference Documentation as well as its tutorials and recipes. There is the freely available online book Practical Gremlin which is a excellent resource for learning the Gremlin language. Despite all these resources and places where documentation could go, I often come across bits of Gremlin, “snippets” perhaps, that are interesting or noteworthy, but fail to be classified well into a category or place. These snippets are interesting in the sense that they teach a way of thinking in the language rather than specific patterns themselves and in that way it would be nice to see them documented and explained.

The general theme of this space will be around the idea that there are these snippets of Gremlin that have a fleeting interest in the moment. A specific explanation within a snippet may directly apply to some aspect of what you happen to be working on in a day. However, reading these posts is likely to promote general Gremlin thinking, which hopefully elevates your ability to write complex graph traversals.

Recent Posts

• TinkerPop 3.8.0 Reflections

  Reflects on TinkerPop 3.8.0’s release strategy, bridging stable Gremlin semantics with future-focused upgrades.

• Semantics of times(0)

  Unpacks subtle differences in Gremlin’s repeat step when `times(0)` is used

• constant() is Not inject() – A Follow-Up

  Distills the core distinction between Gremlin’s `constant()` and `inject()`.

• Unique Vertex Label Anti-pattern

  Warns against the anti-pattern of unique vertex labels in graph databases and advocates for categorical labeling.

• Eager and Lazy tree()

  Differentiates eager and lazy `tree()` semantics in Gremlin.

All posts →