Graph Databases, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Building a Graph Database Application

In this chapter, we discuss some of the practical issues of working with a graph database. In previous chapters, we’ve looked at graph data; in this chapter, we’ll apply that knowledge in the context of developing a graph database application. We’ll look at some of the data modeling questions that may arise, and at some of the application architecture choices available to us.

In our experience, graph database applications are highly amenable to being developed using the evolutionary, incremental, and iterative software development practices in widespread use today. A key feature of these practices is the prevalence of testing throughout the software development life cycle. Here we’ll show how we develop our data model and our application in a test-driven fashion.

At the end of the chapter, we’ll look at some of the issues we’ll need to consider when planning for production.

Data Modeling

We covered modeling and working with graph data in detail in Chapter 3. Here we summarize some of the more important modeling guidelines, and discuss how implementing a graph data model fits with iterative and incremental software development techniques.

Describe the Model in Terms of the Application’s Needs

The questions we need to ask of the data help identify entities and relationships. Agile user stories provide a concise means for expressing an outside-in, user-centered view of an application’s needs, and the questions that arise in the course ...