Databases Intermediate

What is Graph Database?

A database that uses graph structures with nodes, edges, and properties to store and query highly connected data.

Graph databases excel at storing and traversing relationships between entities. Unlike relational databases where joins become expensive with depth, graph databases traverse connections in constant time per hop. Neo4j is the most popular graph database, using the Cypher query language. Use cases include social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, and network topology. PostgreSQL also supports graph-like queries through recursive CTEs and the Apache AGE extension. Graph databases shine when the relationships between data are as important as the data itself.

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Related Terms

Window Function

An SQL function that performs calculations across a set of rows related to the current row without collapsing the result set.

ORM (Object-Relational Mapping)

A technique that lets you interact with a database using object-oriented code instead of writing raw SQL queries.

The default index type in most databases that organizes data in a balanced tree structure for efficient searching, sorting, and range queries.

A distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene, optimized for full-text search and log analysis.

Stored Procedure

A precompiled collection of SQL statements stored in the database that can be executed as a single unit.

The process of copying and maintaining database data across multiple servers for redundancy, failover, and read scaling.

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