Reasons to use graph databases

Every morning when we check our Facebook feed, we are welcomed by a stream of updates from friends and news. Using information about how data is connected and matching it with our individual preferences, Facebook builds a stream of activities from our network that are relevant and interest us. LinkedIn does something similar while suggesting jobs within our network. When we fire up Google Maps or some application such as TomTom or Sygic maps and start navigating to a destination, we use the data that represents connections of various intersections within the city, and work out how best to traverse it. While shopping online, products are recommended to us based on how closely they are connected to what we have already bought or similar products that others have bought. We leverage connected data more and more every day without realizing it.

When dealing with connected data, a graph database gives us the following advantages:

• The query performance of a graph database is a few orders of magnitude better than RDBMS or other NoSQL alternatives. As the dataset grows, RDBMS join performance deteriorates because of the ever-increasing size of the join tables. On the other hand, graph traversals are localized to a portion of the graph. So query execution time is proportional to the number of nodes visited, rather than being proportional to the overall amount of data stored. This makes the query performance fairly constant over time even though the data might increase exponentially.
• Flexibility and agility are major considerations in today's world where business needs are constantly evolving. Developers need to have a tool that allows them to incrementally think of the model rather than locking down the data model before they start coding. Graph databases allow for addition of relationships, node types, and properties without making any changes to the existing queries. We can connect the model incrementally, thereby allowing for more sophisticated querying. This flexibility also means fewer migrations. Even in case of changes to the data model, migrations are relatively pain free and can be done without taking the database offline for a long time, thus helping teams deliver software faster while concentrating on the domain rather than managing infrastructure and communication.
• Lesser ambiguity leads to better models. Since graph databases are schema-less, the schema is dictated by the application and hence is better validated. It allows for better design thinking by developers since there is no ambiguity of the domain model compared to how it is stored in tables.
• The design to delivery time is reduced. From a developer's standpoint, one of the best features of a graph database is that it is whiteboard friendly. We can make a data model on a whiteboard and not worry about trying to translate it to a set of tables, which don't necessarily represent the data model as is. This allows the developers to concentrate on development rather than translation, thereby saving time.

While all that has been said might seem like jargon, it boils down to economics. Graph databases make more economic sense when the data is highly connected.