A Skeptics Guide to Graph Databases - David Bechberger 

It is hard for me NOT to see so. I tend to agree, and I think not a lot of businesses have the river-crossing constrainted situations. What is so wrong with recursive CTEs? used to be performance, but not nowaday with cloud computing..

This is wher graph database will shine. It can serve as bridge.

ha i caught that too, i was like, what's going on here lol

Graph dbs is still a new field. Orient Db was killed by SAP... and there are still tons of players in the market. That being said, SQL also has a ton of databases... there is much more databases than the typical SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server and Oracle... I wonder if graph databases will become like Linux : dozens of differents flavors of everything.

Graph DBs are not any fun facts. They have solid position on the market. But as he said, this not product for all. Howewer graph DBs are very flexible and u can do with them all what you can achive with relational DB. The qustion could be - but why? For me there's only one player on the market: Neo4j. Others are just some attractions.

@Timber Wolf * In a relational database every row in every table is a relation. * If the database is in fifth normal form, the relations consists usually of one or more elementary relations. * There are different kinds of elementary relations. * The first kind of elementary relation is a relation between a primary key (a real world object) and a column value (data object). (In this case the column is called an attribute). * This elementary relation is a functional relation, where the key values form the input, and the column value is the “output”. * Examples: first name, last name, social security number, date of birth of a person where the combination of first and last name, social security number or a surrogate are the alternatives for the primary key (one of them is then the primary key, the others alternate keys). * The second kind of elementary relation is between a primary key and a foreign key. This a relation between two real world objects. * An example is the relation between a person and the (biological) mother (also a person). * This kind of elementary relation is also a functional relation, where the key values form the input, and each column value of the foreign key (or the foreign key as a whole) is the “output”. * The third kind of elementary relation is a relation between two foreign keys. * An example is one person likes another person. * The primary key is formed by the two foreign keys or by a surrogate. * In a triplet store graph database all these elementary relations are edges (with surrogate keys for the objects). * In a labeled-property graph database the first one is a property, the other two are edges. * In a relational database all the elementary relations with the same primary key can be joined in one relation in the fifth normal form (it is also possible not to join the elementary relations, then every elementary relation becomes table and you don’t need nulls). * This means that usually in a relational database a lot of relations are joined and stored together. For a lot of cases there is no need for joining or following pointers… * Another example is the relation: person A knows that person B likes person C. * In fact there are two relations: person B likes person C, and person A knows that … * Both are elementary relations of the third kind, where the second relation is a second order relation (a relation about a relation) * Second and higher order relations are no problem for a triplet store graph database or a relational database (actually very common practice), but are a problem for a labeled-property graph database (unless it is a hypernode or hypergraph database). * I think a lot of misunderstanding comes from Entity-Relationship Modeling, a technique with it’s roots in the pre-relational area. It’s more focused on technical concepts than on conceptual modeling. * As I posted earlier, better use Object Role Modeling. ORM in stead of ERM, one character difference, but a whole world different. * Long story very short: the entities are the relations (properties or edges), and the relationships (the keys) are the objects (or nodes). * Actually you can do without primary and foreign keys (especially with static data and also with views) (primary and foreign keys “only” help keeping dynamic data consistent). Without primary and foreign keys all the information is still there. * On the other hand, if you label the foreign key relationships you can describe the role the object plays in the relation (for example a person having the role of mother in the person X has mother Y). But still, the actual relation is in the row of the table and not in the foreign key relationship. * A foreign key is “only” a reference. If you read in a book about ‘John F. Kennedy’, that’s a reference to a person, you can use that reference or key to look up information elsewhere. * I hope I showed that keys represent real world objects, whether it is a primary, alternate or foreign key. And that a person primary key and a person foreign key with the same values represent the same person! * I hope I showed that the rows are the relations (actually mostly a whole bunch of relations). * If there are any questions left, let me know (for example about performance, I think that in a lot of cases RDBMS outperform (LPG) graph databases).

@Timber Wolf Do you blame ORM, or ERM? I do blame ERM. I think too few people are educated in conceptual and database modeling. And I think ORM gives the right fundamentals and a step by step procedure to come to a conceptual model (actually a graph model!) which can be used to implement in whatever format, or to convert between formats, or to see what can’t be implemented in a certain format (as with second and higher order relations in LPG graph databases).

That is called BPR.

60 / 2 = 30?! Wow, thanks for the insight!

@@superscatboy If you actually took my comment serious as if I thought people wouldn't be able to do that simple math you may need to check your sense of humor, I was joking about how slow he talks, read between the lines

@@dabbopabblo At least you're not pissed off about it 😂

@@superscatboy I thought your comment was berating my intelligence but I see you were probably just adding to the joke lmao, sorry my bad. Maybe my sense of humor is what needs checking