The rise of the graph databases

Relational databases have been with us for a long time. They are not going anywhere, don't worry. There is however a category of problems, for which the relational databases are not best suited. The technology development in recent years allow the graph databases to emerge from academic research and theoretical concepts.

Paul Gillin published an interesting article about graph databases. The databases are on the rise, as many companies intensify efforts to bring the technology to the wide market. The article is well worth reading!

The technology allows for modelling of relations between entities, but in a quite different, more lightweight way. The graph databases are used in social media for example, to track relationships between different aspects of entities - something that would be quite expensive to implement in relational models - think about many-to-many-to-many-... relationships you'd need to support with joins. The applications that use graph technology will have to use completely different querying approach, possibly challenging to people who have spent their careers writing relational daatabases queries.