Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Neo4j Is Whiteboard Friendly

Imagine you need to create a wine suggestion engine in which wines are categorized by different varieties, regions, wineries, vintages, and designations. Imagine that you also need to keep track of things like articles describing those wines written by various authors and to enable users to track their favorite wines.

If you were using a relational model, you might create a category table and a many-to-many relationship between a single winery’s wine and some combination of categories and other data. But this isn’t quite how humans mentally model data. In the following figure, compare this wine suggestion schema in relational UML:

to this wine suggestion data on a whiteboard:

There’s an old saying in the relational ...