I’m developing an application where users can tag resources and it’s also important to know who tagged the resource with a specific tag.
A graph database seems like a good fit for this and the rest of the application but having only previously used traditonal RDBMSs I’m struggling to see how to model this scenario.
I a relational database I would have a “PersonResourceTag” join table to identify which user applied a particular tag, but with a graph database I can’t work out how to associate the person with a tag for a specific resource. Would I need some kind of “PersonTaggedResource” vertex or is there a better way? …or is this simply not a good fit for a graph database?
Graph Databases are in general, a superset of what an RDBMS can do. The implementations are completely different and you have to forget all the RDBMS idioms when you approach using a Graph Database. The relationships are not modeled with a join table, they are modeled directly into the node with a *relationship”. This is called index free adjacency, which is the exact opposite of a join table in an RDBMS.
Person -> Tags[Tag] -> Resource
Where Tag is a Property and the above syntax is very close to the actual GraphQL syntax to query the graph with.
You can get a free copy of Graph Databases from O’reilly, it is a great read.
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