Mogwaï: A framework to handle complex queries on large models

While Model Driven Engineering is gaining more industrial interest, scalability issues when managing large models have become a major problem in current modeling frameworks. Scalable model persistence has been achieved by using NoSQL backends for model storage, but existing modeling framework APIs have not evolved accordingly, limiting NoSQL query performance benefits. In this paper we present the Mogwaı̈, a scalable and efficient model query framework based on a direct translation of OCL queries to Gremlin, a query language supported by several NoSQL databases. Generated Gremlin expressions are computed inside the database itself, bypassing limitations of existing framework APIs and improving overall performance, as confirmed by our experimental results showing an improvement of execution time up to a factor of 20 and a reduction of the memory overhead up to a factor of 75 for large models.