About The Graph Data Modeling Course

If there was one change I would make to college database curriculums, it would be to have students take a graph data modeling course before they took a course relational database.

This sentiment is a reflection on over 30 years of working with data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, database administrators and software developers. Learning relational databases creates the impressions that all databases have a limited ability to model the real world. They teach that modeling relationships is complex and relationships are not first class citizens with their own properties.

These misconceptions cause students to be overly cautious about modeling the real-world with precision. Teaching graph data modeling first can help them learn that precise models of the world can give any organization a competitive advantage over their relational-focused competition.

This book attempts to teach graph data as THE single most important modeling framework any database students has.

Book Structure

This book begins by introducing the foundational concepts we use in modeling the world with graphs. This includes precise definitions of concepts such as nodes, edges, properties and paths.

After we introduce the foundational concepts we enumerate some of the different types of graphs including describing graph structures that don't have the flexibility that we need to build production systems.

Next, we introduce the labeled-property graph (LPG) data model and give some concrete examples of how it is used to model the world.