Graph databases seem to be pretty important these days, with a social network popping up every time someone says "Facebook", so, I decided I'd do a small article on them.
Take a traditional, SQL database.
What's it good at?
Its good at specifying tables in which specific types of data lie.
Okay, what's it bad at?
Well, a lot of things, one of which being that having one piece of data "linked" to others is a complete pain.
What does that mean?
If you're a person, and and you have 500 friends, you need to be linked to 500 other people, all of which, in turn, are linked to you AND a bunch of other people.
Now, let's consider a graph database.
In a graph database, there are things called nodes, properties and edges.
Nodes are close like objects/structs to the OOP people, in that they are entities that can represent people, accounts, etc.
Properties are information that nodes have, for example, if one of the nodes was "Person" its properties might be "Name", "Age" and "Address".
Edges are the things that connect the nodes together, which are really the most important, since in a graph database, it matters a lot more about how the nodes are related than what the nodes actually contain.
Hopefully that made sense, if not, drop a comment below!
Follow if you liked it :)
Take a traditional, SQL database.
What's it good at?
Its good at specifying tables in which specific types of data lie.
Okay, what's it bad at?
Well, a lot of things, one of which being that having one piece of data "linked" to others is a complete pain.
What does that mean?
If you're a person, and and you have 500 friends, you need to be linked to 500 other people, all of which, in turn, are linked to you AND a bunch of other people.
Now, let's consider a graph database.
In a graph database, there are things called nodes, properties and edges.
Nodes are close like objects/structs to the OOP people, in that they are entities that can represent people, accounts, etc.
Properties are information that nodes have, for example, if one of the nodes was "Person" its properties might be "Name", "Age" and "Address".
Edges are the things that connect the nodes together, which are really the most important, since in a graph database, it matters a lot more about how the nodes are related than what the nodes actually contain.
Hopefully that made sense, if not, drop a comment below!
Follow if you liked it :)
Relational databases are excellent at handling linked data. That's actually the basis of *relational* DBMS's. Not to say they fit every use case, though..
ReplyDeleteWhat I meant to say was that they can handle linked data, but not linked *entities*.
DeleteI should have said that a bit more clearly.