Get Started with Schema Designer

The Schema Designer provides a user-friendly interface for schema management, allowing you to adapt your graph database to changing requirements and optimize its performance.

The graph schema defines the structure of your graph database, influencing its performance and functionality.

With the Schema Designer, you can easily modify and manage the schema of your graph databases by:

Defining vertex and edge types.
Specifying properties and indexes.
Establish relationships between elements.

1) Get Started

Navigate to the Design Schema Page. It is accessible from:

Navigation Menu > Design Schema.
Workspace general page.
GSQL Editor page.
Load Data page.
Solution Builder page.

The comprehensive list of shortcuts can make your schema design process more efficient and productive.

2) Create a Graph

Before creating vertices and edges, you need to create a graph in the Schema Designer.

A graph represents the overall structure and framework of your graph database.

When creating a graph, you define:

Its name.
Any global settings or configurations that apply to the entire graph.

You can skip creating a graph if you are defining the global graph schema.
1. Now click on the Create New Graph button in the graph selector dropdown menu.
2. Specify the graph name in the pop-up window.

The initial creation of the first graph may require up to 2 minutes as the services warm up and the necessary environment is set up.

3) Create a Vertex

You can now create vertices to define the entities or nodes in your graph database. Vertices represent distinct entities you want to represent in your graph model, such as:

users
products
locations
or any other objects .

Creating vertices involves specifying the vertex name and any attributes associated with it.

Click on the button, or hold key V and Left Click on the graph to create a vertex.
Once a vertex is created, you can configure the name and its attributes in the properties panel.

4) Create a Edge

Create edges to establish relationships between vertices in your graph database.

Edges represent the connections or relationships between entities.

When creating an edge, you define the edge name, the source vertex, the target vertex, and any attributes associated with the edge.

Use your mouse drag from the border of a vertex and drop to a new position to create a new vertex and new edge or drop to an existing vertex to only create a new edge.
Once an edge is created, you can now configure the edge name, and its attributes in the properties panel.

5) Attributes

Attributes play a crucial role in defining the properties or characteristics of vertices and edges in your graph database. You can define attributes for vertices and edges to store additional information about them.

Attributes can be of different data types, such as strings, integers, booleans, or dates, and they provide valuable context and details to your graph data.

6) Advanced Settings For Vertex

The Advanced Settings section allows you to fine tune the definition of a vertex type in your graph database by configuring additional settings.

You can click on the Advanced Settings button on a vertex to configure the following settings:

Enable As Attribute for primary key. For details, please refer to WITH primary_id_as_attribute documentation.
Enable index for non-primary key attributes. Indexes improve the speed of data retrieval operations by providing quick access paths to the data. For details, please refer to Alter Index documentation.

7) Advanced Settings For Edge

The Advanced Settings section allows you to fine tune the definition of an edge type in your graph database by configuring additional settings.

You can click on the Advanced Settings button on an edge to configure the following settings:

Specify other vertex pairs. You can define additional vertex pairs for an edge to establish more complex relationships between different types of vertices.
Specify edge discriminators. Discriminators allow you to distinguish between different types of edges or relationships, providing more granularity in your graph schema. For details, please refer to the DISCRIMINATOR documentation.
For directed edges, you can specify a reverse edge to create a bidirectional relationship. This can be useful for queries that need to traverse edges in both directions. For details, please refer to WITH REVERSE_EDGE documentation.

Next Steps

Next, learn how to use GSQL Editor in TigerGraph Cloud 4.

Or return to the Overview page for a different topic.