When to use graph databases

NoSQL Concepts

Miriam Antona

Software engineer

Suitable cases - General information

• Highly connected data

Suitable cases - Social graphs

• Social networks
  • Users and their relationships
  • Posts
  • Likes
  • ...
• Employees of a company
  • Projects
  • Relationships between the employees

Suitable cases - Infectious diseases

• Model:
  • Interactions between people
  • Contact events
  • Exposures
• Help to understand transmission chains

Suitable cases - Location services

• Locations and distances
• Optimize the routes for navigation applications
• Recommendations for nearby points of interest:
  • restaurants
  • cinemas
  • hospitals
  • etc.

Suitable cases - Fraud detection

• Stop fraud in real-time:
  • Credit card fraud
  • E-commerce fraud
  • Money laundering
• Model: individuals, credit cards, phone numbers, devices, IP addresses...
• Uncover suspicious patterns:
  • multiple users coming from the same IP
  • ...

Suitable cases - Real-time recommendations

• Store buying history and browsing behavior to recommend an item
• Offer an item to a friend
• Show unwatched movies based on similar users

Suitable cases - Networks

• Storage of relationships between networks and infrastructure elements
  • physical machines
  • virtual machines
  • applications
  • routers
  • switches
  • ...
• Alert in real-time about potential design flaws

Unsuitable cases

• Disconnected data
• Relationships between the data are not important
• Applications that only perform general searches without a specific starting point
  • Are not optimized for those queries
• Properties that contain extremely large values (BLOBs, CLOBs...)

Let's practice!

NoSQL Concepts