Graph Databases will change your life!

The Evolution of Databases

Gone are the days when we use to use flimsy old punch tapes to store data. Data used be stored on punch tapes which was a horrible way to store data. It raised many problems such as indexing or cross reference to eliminate consistencies, but it was the best that we had at the time.

Then came along relational databases where we started storing data in tables. Sometimes these tables were human readable, but as soon as you normalize the data to eliminate duplication an inconsistencies many fields start referencing auto generated numerical foreign keys and your data becomes difficult to understand and maintain without complicated joined queries. As the data size grows in your relational database it gets more expensive to perform query time index look ups for each and every join in the table.
Things got a little less comfortable since the cloud came along due to the data explosion, which made querying data more difficult. It then begged the question, how can our database technologies keep up? Relational database couldn't certainly answer this question.

What are Graph Databases?

Graph databases is a relationship first approach to storing and querying your data. They store data in a more logical fashion, in a way that represents the real world and prioritizes the representation, discovererability and maintainability of data relationships. They use graph data structures for queries with nodes, edges and properties to represent and store data. The key concept of the technology is the graph which directly relates data items in the store. The relationships allow data in the store to be linked together directly, and in many cases retrieved with one operation.