Visualize graphs
Kùzu Explorer
Kùzu Explorer is a browser-based frontend to visualize and explore Kùzu database schemas and query results in the form of a graph, table, or JSON. This is a useful tool for exploring your graph data and debugging your data model during the prototyping phase. An example visualization is shown below.
Launching Explorer
Kùzu Explorer is a web application that is launched from a deployed Docker image. Please refer to the Docker documentation for details on how to install and use Docker.
Below we show two different ways to launch Kùzu Explorer. Each of these options make Kùzu Explorer accessible on http://localhost:8000. If the launching is successful, you should see the logs similar to the following in your shell:
Option 1: Using an existing database
To access an existing Kùzu database, you can mount its path to the /database
directory as follows:
By mounting local database files to Docker via -v /absolute/path/to/database:/database
,
the changes done in the UI will persist to the local database files after the UI is shutdown.
The --rm
flag tells docker that the container should automatically be removed after we close docker.
Option 2: Start with an empty database with example data
You can also launch Kùzu Explorer without specifying an existing database. Kùzu Explorer comes with
bundled datasets that you can use to explore the basic functionalities of Kùzu.
This is simply done by removing the -v
flag in the example above. If no database path is specified
with -v
, the server will be started with an empty database.
Click on the Datasets
tab on the top right corner and then: (i) you can select one of the bundled dataset
of your choice from the drow-down menu; (ii) load it into Kùzu by clicking the “Load Dataset” button; and (iii)
finally use Kùzu Explorer to explore it.
Additional launch configurations
Access mode
By default, Kùzu Explorer is launched in read-write mode, which means that you can modify the database. If you want to launch Kùzu Explorer in read-only mode, you can do so by setting the MODE
environment variable to READ_ONLY
as follows.
In read-only mode, you can still issue read queries and visualize the results, but you cannot run write queries or modify the schema.
Buffer pool size
By default, Kùzu Explorer is launched with a maximum buffer pool size of 80% of the available memory. If you want to launch Kùzu Explorer with a different buffer pool size, you can do so by setting the KUZU_BUFFER_POOL_SIZE
environment variable to the desired value in bytes as follows.
For example, to launch Kùzu Explorer with a buffer pool size of 1GB, you can run the following command.
Accessing data files in the container
As mentioned above, Kùzu Explorer is launched from a Docker image. If you want to access the data files in the container, you can do so by mounting a directory on your host machine as follows:
With this configuration, the data directory you specify on your host machine will be accessible as /data
in the container. For example, in the shell panel, you can copy a CSV file into your database by running the following command:
Note that it is possible to mount multiple directories in the container. For more details, refer to the Docker documentation.
Panels
Kùzu Explorer has 3 panels: (i) the Shell
panel, (ii) the Schema
panel, (iii) the Settings
panel.
You can refer to the corresponding cards below for more details.