Introduction to graph databases

Graph databases (databases that store data in network form) offer many advantages over traditional relational databases. First, graph databases can capture and traverse hierarchical relationships. While relational databases can capture taxonomies, they do so in different columns that are not explicitly linked.

In addition, graph databases capture complex relationships between items or groups of items explicitly by connecting them with edges. This allows for multiway relationships to exist within the database; querying for nearest neighbors, for instance, is much easier when neighbors are connected by an edge and do not require estimation steps to find Euclidean or Manhattan distances between all items in the database.

Furthermore, graph databases can capture the directionality of relationships between items in the database very easily. In a relational database, the directionality of a single relationship may involve several columns’ worth...