A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

Graph Databases

Because graphs are so versatile at handling relationships, there are actually databases that store data in the form of a graph. Traditional relational databases (databases that store data as columns and rows) can also store such data, but let’s compare their performance against graph databases for dealing with something like a social network.

Let’s say that we have a social network in which there are five friends who are all connected to each other. These friends are Alice, Bob, Cindy, Dennis, and Ethel. A graph database that will store their personal information may look something like this:

We can use a relational database to ...