For RDB Users

For users familiar with relational databases who want to understand how Actionbase fits alongside an RDB.

Why Consider Actionbase?

As services grow, tables storing user interactions—likes, recent views, follows—often hit scaling walls:

• Shard key management and hot entities
• Cross-shard queries
• Cache consistency

Actionbase handles these by modeling interactions as who did what to which target, with write-time materialization on horizontally scalable storage.

From Tables to Interactions

In an RDB, interaction data often lives in tables like:

• user_follows (user–user)
• user_likes (user–item)
• user_views (user–item)

In Actionbase, these become edges:

• Source: who (e.g., user_id)
• Target: what (e.g., product_id, user_id)
• Properties: schema-defined (e.g., created_at)

Read-optimized structures (indexes, counts) are pre-computed at write time.

When Actionbase Fits

• Interaction tables dominate volume
• Queries focus on listing or counting relationships
• Sharding these tables gets painful

Using Actionbase with an RDB

Actionbase complements an RDB, not replaces it.

A common pattern:

1. Transactional and domain data stays in RDB
2. Large-scale interaction data moves to Actionbase
3. Interaction queries served from Actionbase

Start by migrating only the tables that present scaling challenges.

Example: Mapping a Table

RDB

CREATE TABLE user_product_wish (
    id BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    user_id VARCHAR(255),
    product_id VARCHAR(255),
    created_at TIMESTAMP,
    visibility VARCHAR(50)
);

Actionbase

graph LR
    Alice((Alice)) -->|wishes| Phone((📱 Phone))
    Alice -->|wishes| Laptop((💻 Laptop))
    Bob((Bob)) -->|wishes| Phone

• Source: user_id (STRING)
• Target: product_id (STRING)
• Properties: created_at (LONG), visibility (STRING)

The id column is not needed—unique-edges are identified by source and target.

Note: For multi-edge cases (e.g., multiple gifts from the same user to the same recipient), each edge requires a unique id — see FAQ.

Indexes for efficient queries:

• created_at DESC — recent wishes
• visibility, created_at DESC — filtered by visibility

Next Steps

• Schema — Define your edge schema
• Quick Start — Try Actionbase in minutes