Neo4j - Introduction to some Graph Use Cases

Last week we spoke about domain modeling with Neo4j and Django. Today I offer a presentation from Peter Neubauer, COO of Neo Technologies, discussing various use cases that are well suited for graph databases.

Couple of quick points with respect to graph databases:

• Graphs are made up of both nodes and relationships between nodes, another was to say this is vertices and edges
• Extension to a regular graph is a property graph, in which, both the nodes and the relationships can both have properties associated with them
• One of the key benefits to using graph databases, or at least in Neo4j's case, is the fast traversal between nodes, there is a huge performance gain, especially when compared to a relational database like MySQL.

Peter, provides numerous examples of problems which are nicely handled by graph databases. I'm going to list them with the slide number so you can view the respective slides

• Social Graph (think Facebook), slide 6
• Spatial Data, slide 8
• Social + Spatial Graph (Facebook + Location Data), slide 10
• Financial Trail (show me the money), slide 11
• Indexing, slide 18
• Recommendations, slide 21

I've found the graph database arena to be quite fascinating. Seeing examples, as the ones Peter has shown us only feed that interest. It will be curious to see what other problems find solutions through graph databases. Are you trying to solve a unique problem with a graph database? Let us know what you are trying to do in the comments section of this post.