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...
