Graph Database

 

What is a Graph Database?

A graph database stores nodes and relationships instead of tables, or documents. Data is stored just like you might sketch ideas on a whiteboard. Your data is stored without restricting it to a pre-defined model, allowing a very flexible way of thinking about and using it.

Why Graph Databases?

We live in a connected world, and understanding most domains requires processing rich sets of connections to understand what’s really happening. Often, we find that the connections between items are as important as the items themselves.

How else do people do this today? While existing relational databases can store these relationships, they navigate them with expensive JOIN operations or cross-lookups, often tied to a rigid schema. It turns out that "relational" databases handle relationships poorly. In a graph database, there are no JOINs or lookups. Relationships are stored natively alongside the data elements (the nodes) in a much more flexible format. Everything about the system is optimized for traversing through data quickly; millions of connections per second, per core.

Graph databases address big challenges many of us tackle daily. Modern data problems often involve many-to-many relationships with heterogeneous data that sets up needs to:

• Navigate deep hierarchies,

• Find hidden connections between distant items, and

• Discover inter-relationships between items.