Hi, In this blog we will be looking and exploring what is a graph database. Its applications, advantages and how Apache AGE can help us in this regards.
Graph Database
A graph database is a special type of database which is used to manage our data. From the very begining data has been an important part of the computer. And we have different ways to store, process and show that data. Traditional ways are relational databases. In relational databases we store data in tables with some predefined schemas for that table.
And we store data in the table based on that specific schema. Infact we can't store anything that does not match with that schema.
On the other hand, Graph databases organize data in the form of nodes and edges instead of table and documents. Infact, it shows the data as node and relationalship between the data as an edge between the data.
A graph database is more easy to understand relations between the data as compared to traditional database.
Understanding relation between data is much easier through the image above as compared with the simple tables of these data.
Key Features
1. It uses graph structure to explain relation between data and connect them using edges between data. In this way we can easily visualize complex relations.
2. As it stores data on nodes. So, nodes can also store some metadata which can provide us some additional information.
3. It's easy to traverse a graphed structure database to navigate from one node to the other one through the defined relation. This traversing capability enables very fast and efficient querying of difficult to understand relationships.
4. As tables database required predefined schema. Graph database are flexible towards these predefined schema. They allow nodes and relationship to have different properties and structures.
5. These graph databases are so designed to manage the relationship between nodes elegantly. As compared to complex joins in traditional database, graph database can get the data from databse more quickly.
Apache AGE:
Apache AGE is a PostgreSQL extension that provides the graph databse functionality over the top of PostgreSQL. AGE stands for A Graph Extension. You can learn more about Apache AGE.
It provides many functionalities like hybrid queries, fast graph query processing graph visualization and analytics and much more.
References
https://age.apache.org/download
https://neo4j.com/developer/graph-database/
Top comments (0)