In this chapter, we introduced you to graph databases by creating a topology that monitors a subset of the Twitter firehose and persists that information to the Titan graph database for further analysis. We've also demonstrated the reuse of generic components by using generic building blocks from earlier chapters such as the Logback Kafka appender.

While graph databases are not perfect for every use case, they represent a powerful weapon in your arsenal of polyglot persistence tools. Polyglot persistence is a term often used to describe a software architecture that involves multiple types of data stores such as relational, key-value, graph, document, and so on. Polyglot persistence is all about choosing the right database for the right job. In this chapter, we introduced you to graph data models, and have hopefully inspired you to explore situations where a graph may be the best data model to support a given use case. Later in the book, we will create a Storm application that persists...