The Coming of Age of Graph Databases

Abstract

My journey into graph databases came quite by chance. In 2007, I met my future boss over conference drinks in Malmö, Sweden. I was consulting in finance and telecoms at the time and my future boss kept telling me how there were structures called graphs in my data. Unfazed I told him he didn’t know how databases work, and that my data was made from tables. On my return to work, something about what he’d said stuck with me. A problem involving retail recommendations with purchase history and bundling that seemed very difficult with a relational database was solved in one (long) afternoon. The tool I used was the somewhat cryptically-named graph database, Neo4j. I was hooked on the technology and soon after joined the company.