When Your Data Is Not a Graph

I often get asked at the Neo4jtrainings and meetups about which types of data or use cases a graph database doesn’t handle. While graph data structure models the world we live in exceptionally well there are some use cases and scenarios where your data is not a graph – or more likely not ONLY a graph.

The Neo4j graph database is used for many use cases and influences the situations of current world leaders by representing effectively how these are connected, allow fraud rings and networks to be surfaced through their common connections, enables business analyst to understand the relationships within their data for better business insights, and help users increase their chances of finding pertinent documents within a network.

Any of these connected data examples benefits tremendously from a native graph database like Neo4j. At the same time, there are other scenarios where your data is not a graph.

Not Only a Graph Rather than Not a Graph

Here are a examples to help you think through data and understand if you’re dealing with data that would benefit from being represented as a graph:

• When data entities have no contextual importance via their connections with other data entities
  For instance, if you’re building some kind of calculator, the housing medium for your numbers, equations, and base data won’t likely be taking advantage of powerful contextual relationships.
  Another scenario could if you’re tracking your personal budget each month and simply want to see if you spent more than you made at the end because in this case your goal isn’t to understand the relationships of where that money was spent.
  However, as soon as you want to be able to ask questions about the items in that budget and see more details about the expenditure and which person within your household executed the transaction, where it occurred and whom they were with at the time. Now you’ve got a graph problem.
• When data involves large text files, web pages, or JSON documents
  If your scenario requires bulk storage and direct lookup retrieval of large string data without any requirement on the connections between documents then you’ll be better of using a pure

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