The Practitioner's Guide to Graph Data

Chapter 4. Exploring Neighborhoods in Development

To get to the next phase in graph application development, we are going to build upon the simple Customer 360 (C360) application from Chapter 3. We’ll add a few more layers, or neighborhoods, onto that example to illustrate the next wave of concepts in graph thinking.

Adding data to our example provides a more realistic picture of the complexity of data modeling, querying, and applying graph thinking to our customer-centric financial data.

We consider the transition from the basic example in Chapter 3 to the complexity in this chapter to be analogous to steps in the process of learning how to scuba dive. What we did in Chapter 3 was like starting to learn how to scuba dive in a wading pool; it is not really clear what the point is when you are in water that shallow. But we needed to start from a familiar place. The examples in this chapter are like scuba diving in a deep pool. Afterwards, we will be ready to head into more interesting depths in Chapter 5.

Chapter Preview: Building a More Realistic Customer 360

There are three main sections within this chapter.

In the first section, we will explore and explain graph thinking to present best practices in graph data modeling. We will do this by adding more neighborhoods of data to our C360 example so that we can answer the following questions:

1. What are the most recent 20 transactions involving Michael’s account?

2. In December, at which vendors did Michael shop, and with what frequency? ...