Book Image

Learning Neo4j

By : Rik Van Bruggen
Book Image

Learning Neo4j

By: Rik Van Bruggen

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Neo4j
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Where to Find More Information Related to Neo4j
Index

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...