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Graph Database
Graph Database
GeeksforGeeks
Representation:
The graph database is based on graph theory. The data is stored in the nodes of the graph
and the relationship between the data are represented by the edges between the nodes.
If we have friends of friends and stuff like that, these are many to many relationships.
Used when the query in the relational database is very complex.
For example- there is a profile and the profile has some specific information in it but the
major selling point is the relationship between these different profiles that is how you get
connected within a network.
In the same way, if there is data element such as user data element inside a graph
database there could be multiple user data elements but the relationship is what is going
to be the factor for all these data elements which are stored inside the graph database.
When you add lots of relationships in the relational database, the data sets are going to be
huge and when you query it, the complexity is going to be more complex and it is going
to be more than a usual time. However, in graph database, it is specifically designed for
this particular purpose and one can query relationship with ease.
Why do Graph Databases matter? Because graphs are good at handling relationships,
some databases store data in the form of a graph.
Example We have a social network in which five friends are all connected. These friends are
Anay, Bhagya, Chaitanya, Dilip, and Erica. A graph database that will store their personal
information may look something like this:
Now, we will also a need another table to capture the friendship/relationship between
users/friends. Our friendship table will look something like this:
user_id friend_id
1 2
1 3
1 4
1 5
2 1
2 3
2 4
2 5
3 1
3 2
3 4
3 5
4 1
4 2
4 3
4 5
5 1
5 2
5 3
5 4
We will avoid going deep into the Database(primary key & foreign key) theory. Instead just
assume that the friendship table uses id’s of both the friends. Assume that our social
network here has a feature that allows every user to see the personal information of
his/her friends. So, If Chaitanya were requesting information then it would mean she needs
information about Anay, Bhagya, Dilip and Erica. We will approach this problem the
traditional way(Relational database). We must first identify Chaitanya’s id in the User’s
table:
Now, we’d look for all tuples in friendship table where the user_id is 3. Resulting relation
would be something like this:
user_id friend_id
3 1
3 2
3 4
3 5
Now, let’s analyse the time taken in this Relational database approach. This will be
approximately log(N) times where N represents the number of tuples in friendship table or
number of relations. Here, the database maintains the rows in the order of id’s. So, in
general for ‘M’ no of queries, we have a time complexity of M*log(N) Only if we had used a
graph database approach, the total time complexity would have been O(N). Because, once
we’ve located Cindy in the database, we have to take only a single step for finding her
friends. Here is how our query would be executed:
Advantages: Frequent schema changes, managing volume of data, real-time query
response time, and more intelligent data activation requirements are done by graph
model.
Disadvantages: Note that graph databases aren’t always the best solution for an
application. We will need to assess the needs of application before deciding the
architecture.
Graph Databases may not be offering better choice over the NoSQL variations.
If application needs to scale horizontally this may introduces poor performance.
Not very efficient when it needs to update all nodes with a given parameter.