Towards a Standard for Triggers in Property Graphs

Graph databases are emerging as the leading data management technology for storing large knowledge graphs; significant efforts are ongoing to produce new standards (such as the Graph Query Language, GQL) and enrich them with properties, types, schemas, and keys. In this article, we present PG-Triggers, a proposal for adding triggers to Property Graphs, along the direction marked by the SQL3 Standard. Wedefine the syntax and semantics of PG-Triggers and briefly discuss how they can be implemented on top of the most popular graph databases. The main objective of this article is to discuss an active database standard for graph databases as a first-class citizen at a time when reactive graph management is in its infancy, so as to minimize the conversion efforts towards a full-fledged standard proposal.