Return to search

Comparative analysis of PropertyFirst vs. EntityFirst modeling approaches in graph databases

While relational databases still hold the primary position in the database technology domain, and have been for the longest time of any Computer Science technology has since its inception, for the first time the relational databases now have valid and worthy opponent in the NoSQL database movement.
NoSQL databases, even though not many people have heard of them, with a significant number of Computer Science people included, have spread rapidly in many shapes and forms and have done so in quite a chaotic fashion. Similarly to the way they appeared and spread, design and modeling for them have been undertaken in an unstructured manner. Currently they are subcategorized in 4 main groups as: Key-value stores, Column Family stores, Document stores and Graph databases.
In this thesis, different modeling approaches for graph databases, applied to the same domain are analyzed and compared, especially from a design perspective.
The database selected here as the implemented technology is Neo4J by Neo Technologies and is a directed property graph database, which means that relationships between its data entities must have a starting and ending (or source and destination) node.
This research provides an overview of two competing modeling approaches and evaluates them in a context of a real world example.
The work done here shows that both of these modeling approaches are valid and that it is possible to fully develop a data model based on the same domain data with both approaches and that both can be used later to support application access in a similar fashion. One of the models provides for faster access to data, but at a cost of higher maintenance and increased complexity.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:USASK/oai:ecommons.usask.ca:10388/ETD-2015-03-2005
Date2015 March 1900
ContributorsDeters, Ralph
Source SetsUniversity of Saskatchewan Library
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext, thesis

Page generated in 0.0017 seconds