PathFinder: A unified approach for handling paths in graph query languages
Path matching in graph query languages (e.g., Cypher, SQL/PGQ, GQL) lacks a unified and efficient processing mechanism—particularly when supporting complex path semantics (e.g., shortest paths, simple paths) and regular-expression constraints on edge labels—posing dual challenges in expressive power and performance. This paper introduces the first cross-language, general-purpose path-solving framework. It features a compact symbolic path representation and integrates dynamic-programming-based enumeration, incremental pipelined execution, and regex compilation optimizations to enable unified modeling and efficient evaluation of diverse path semantics and edge-label constraints. Experimental evaluation on real-world datasets and complex queries demonstrates an order-of-magnitude speedup over state-of-the-art graph engines, while maintaining high expressiveness, strong scalability, and behavioral stability.