How to start modeling for graph databases
In this section, we will spend some time going through what a graph database model is. Specifically, we would like to clarify a common misunderstanding that originates from our habitual relational database system knowledge.
What we know – ER diagrams and relational schemas
In a relational system, we have been taught to start out modeling with an Entity-Relationship diagram. Using these techniques, we can start from a problem/domain description (what we call a user story in today's agile development methodologies) and extract the meaningful entities and relationships. We will come back to this later, but essentially, we usually find that from such a domain description, we can:
Extract the entities by looking at the nouns of the description
Extract the properties by looking at the adjectives of the description
Extract the relationship by looking at the operating verbs in the description
These are, of course, generic guidelines that will need to be tried...
