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Gadam
Gadam

Reputation: 3024

How does Graph Database achieve Flexible Schema?

I have read in a lot of Online sources that one of the advantages of Graph Databases is flexible schema. But haven't found how that exactly can be achieved.

Wikipedia says 'Graphs are flexible, meaning it allows the user to insert new data into the existing graph without loss of application functionality.'But that is something we can do in a Relational Database also, at-least to an extent.

Can someone shed more light on this? Thanks.

Edit: Giving an example to make it more clear:

Take for example a User table:

  FirstName|LastName|email|Facebook|Twitter|Linkedin|

Now, some users might have FB, and not Twitter and Linkedin or vice versa. Maybe they have multiple email ids? How do you represent that?

Graph DB: 
Vertices for User, FB_Link, Twitter_Link, Email. 
Edges (from User) to FB, Edge to Twitter, Edge to Linkedin, Edge to Email (x 2 times) etc.



Json/DocumentDB: 
  {
  ID:
  FirstName:
  LastName:
  FB:
  }
  {
  ID:
  FirstName:
  LastName:
  Twitter:
  Linkedin:
  }

  Notice that the documents can have different attributes.

Am I Correct in the above interpretation of Schema Flexibility? Is there more to it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 591

Answers (1)

Filipe Teixeira
Filipe Teixeira

Reputation: 3565

The wikipedia article is over simplifying things with the statement:

allows the user to insert new data into the existing graph without loss of application functionality

Any database allows you to insert data without losing application functionality. Rather lets focus on the flexible schema side of graph databases because here is where there is a difference.

A Brief Side Note

SQL is built on the relational model which enforces strong consistency checks between data records. It does this via enforcing locks on structural changes. Graph databases are built on the property graph model and this enforces no such relational constraints. Which means no locks (in most cases). It only enforces key-value pairs on constructs called vertices connected together via edges

With that bit context discussed lets talk about your main question:

How Is a Flexible Schema Achieved

Due to property graphs formally not having any constraint rules to satisfy in order to function you can pretty much enforce a graph representation on any data source. Technically even on a sql table with no indices if you so chose.

How this is done practically though varies from graph db to graph db. The field lacks standardisation at the moment. For example,

  • JanusGraph runs on different NoSql DBs such as a wide column store and a document store.
  • OrientDB uses a json document store.
  • RedisGraph uses an in-memory key-value store.
  • Neo4j uses it's own data model which I am not familiar with.

Note how all of the above use NoSQL DBs as the backbone. This is how a flexible schema is achieved. All these graph databases simply store the data outside of relational dbs/tables where there are "no" rules. Document stores and json being a good example.

If you curious about an example implementation of a property graph model you can checkout Neo4j's model or JanusGraphs' Docs or a generic comparison of their models

Upvotes: 2

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