An Introduction to Graph Databases

The last few years have seen an explosion of new paradigms in databases. Previously the relational database management system (RDBMS) as epitomized by the likes of Microsoft's SQLServer or Oracles MySQL had been the de facto route for those looking for a database. I touched on the reasons for this, and looked at some of the newer, or re-discovered, alternatives in one of my earlier pieces; in this article I'm going to dig deeper into one of these, the Graph Database, to explore what they can do, and to show some use cases where they shine. Graph Databases, as the name suggests, organize data in the form of a graph, based on the mathematical principle of graph theory. Fundamentally, we can consider a graph as a collection of nodes and edges.