In the recent years, the data landscape has changed significantly: massively structured and unstructured data is being generated from various sources. Applications and services are being developed with agile methodologies more frequently than ever, the data changes being fast and significant. Scalability requirements are also very important. Relational database management systems are not designed to handle all these challenges. Therefore, enterprises use NoSQL database solutions, which are more appropriate for new data requirements.
Graph databases belong to the NoSQL databases family. They have only existed for a few years and are used for storing and querying highly connected data, usually connected with many-to-many relations. SQL Server 2017 offers graph database capabilities in a feature called SQL Graph.
This chapter is divided into the following three...