NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence

Chapter 11. Graph Databases

Graph databases allow you to store entities and relationships between these entities. Entities are also known as nodes, which have properties. Think of a node as an instance of an object in the application. Relations are known as edges that can have properties. Edges have directional significance; nodes are organized by relationships which allow you to find interesting patterns between the nodes. The organization of the graph lets the data to be stored once and then interpreted in different ways based on relationships.

11.1. What Is a Graph Database?

In the example graph in Figure 11.1, we see a bunch of nodes related to each other. Nodes are entities that have properties, such as name. The node of Martin is actually ...