Graph Databases

Graph Databases

Graph databases are a type of datastore which treat the relationship between things as equally important to the things themselves. Examples of datasets that are natural fits for graph databases: Friend links on a social network “People who bought this also bought…” Amazon-style recommendation engines The world wide web In graph database parlance, a thing (a person, a book, a website) is referred to as a “node,” while a relationship between two things (a friendship, a related book, an href) is referred to as an “edge.” In most types of databases, the records stored in the database are nodes, and edges (relationships) are derived from a field on a node. In a SQL database, for example, you might have a table called “people” that includes a field “friend_id.” friend_id is a reference to another record in the people table. The weakness with reference fields becomes apparent as ...

Full article: http://adam.heroku.com/past/2010/3/15/graph_databases/