Refactoring reasoning

As an organization grows and develops, its needs can change, including its data storage requirements. Data that is sufficient to operate a service or process can change over time, and it often pays to plan for changing requirements in advance. Managing change in database systems varies in difficulty depending on your current schema and database type, and in this chapter, we will discuss and demonstrate the advantages of using a graph data model when dealing with evolving data structures.

In this section, you will learn about the tools to help you prepare for refactoring effectively. This will include changes in relational schema, the impacts these can have on substantial schema rework, and what you should consider at the point of design, relating to evolving schemas that can effectively handle these changes.

Change in relational and graph databases

In more traditional relational database systems, adding new types of data can sometimes be challenging,...