Graph Databases, 2nd Edition

Foreword

Graphs Are Eating The World, And There’s No Going Back

In the three years since we first wrote Graph Databases, our industry has witnessed a fundamental shift in the way in which it views its data assets.

Data, always present in some stratum of innovation, has for several decades delivered only a fraction of its potential, in large part because the technologies at our disposal have forced us to treat it as though it were nothing but isolated islands of middling significance. Graphs and graph databases change this completely.

As vertical after vertical discovers the transformative power of connected data, the breakaway leaders in these industries are stealing an irreversible march on their competitors. Graphs are everywhere, they’re eating the world, and there’s no going back.

As I wrote in my foreword to the first edition, this change in perspective started almost two decades ago, when a precocious web search startup challenged the dominance of the market leaders—AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, et al—through its application of a simple algorithm that made sense of the way in which web documents are connected.

Today, Google dominates the web search space. In its wake, other industry leaders have asked themselves: “What if we take the relationships and connections in our data and reimagined our business along those relationships? What would that look like?” The answers to these questions are omnipresent in our online lives today in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and the like. ...