Universal Data Modeling

Chapter 7. Relational Model and Graph Model

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So far, you have learned about the general logical model design process, the fundamental document model, and several flavors of key based models. From the document model to the key-value model, then to the wide-column model, the evolution is around applying rules on the schema to enable certain behavior improvements, such as the split between key and non key attributes, and the explicit definition of schema structure on the non key attributes. By explicitly defining certain attribute(s) as the key, and focusing operations on the key attribute(s), key based models achieve significant performance gain and other benefits, but also limit themselves in not being able to handle complex queries and relationships between datasets.

In an enterprise, there are many different datasets. The interactions between these datasets are as important as the datasets themselves. The ability to handle the interactions is a key requirement for the enterprise level data management system. This ...