By the end of this tutorial, you will master the creation of data models for property graph databases.

1. Hackolade Tutorial
Part 11 – Create a model for graph databases
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2. Note
• Note: this part of the Hackolade tutorial is specific to property graph
databases such as Neo4j, Cosmos DB with Gremlin API, JanusGraph,
Neptune with Gremlin API, Tinkerpop, etc.
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3. About property graph databases
• Special family of NoSQL databases
• Unique ability to “treat relationships as first class citizens”
• Allows to reveal hidden relationships between data elements more easily and
quickly
• Different from “relational” databases: there, relations are used to
enforce referential integrity between normalized entities, using
foreign keys
• Relational databases “JOIN” the data at read time
• Graph databases explicitly connect the data at write time
• Use cases: fraud detection, recommendation engines, social
networks, logistics, pathfinding, graph data science, …
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4. About property graph databases
• Using
• vertices / nodes for entities,
• edges / relationships for the links
between specific instances of entities
• properties on BOTH nodes and
relationships to qualify them
• labels to group nodes together in
subgraphs
• types to categorize relationships
• Visually attractive!
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5. Graphs can be represented in an ERD
• Special adaptation for properties on relationships
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6. Creating a graph diagram
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7. Specific toolbar functions
• Toggle force-directed layout
• Orientation of label names
• Attribute boxes
• Pinning of individual nodes
• See this page for many more controls
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8. Forward-engineering for Property graphs
• Depends on the capabilities of the target technology
• With or without schema
• By example when no schema
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9. Reading material
• See Hackolade online documentation
• The Hackolade Blog
• These excellent new books:
• Neo4j Data Modeling
• MongoDB Data Modeling & Schema Design
• Many of the principles in the book are related to query
driven modeling based on access patterns
• Hackolade’s on social media: LinkedIn page, Twitter page
• Download Hackolade studio for free
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10. Questions?
Answers!
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