Have you heard about Graph Databases? They are a new way of storing data that helps to show relationships between things or people instead of the traditional style. of a relational database. These relationships are given a level of importance and can be used to determine other relationships that your items might have. This introduction should give you an overview of what they are about, things to look out for and since there are several ways that you can use graph databases in your application or site development, a jumping-off point to begin learning more about how they can make your design better.

What is a Graph Database?

Graph databases are unlike traditional relational databases since the data is not stored in rows or columns. There are no key-value pairs or normalization to have to worry about. Data is stored in an object-oriented format and called a “node”. Each node can be defined as a person, thing, object, etc… and relationships between nodes are defined as an “edge”. Nodes can contain as much information as we would like to store, so a person node could have a name, age, address, etc…Unlike traditional database models, each relationship between nodes can be given an identifying label as well as an importance. This way you can see relationships such as “Who works at X and likes Y and has also been to location Z” without having to struggle through multiple join statements.