Chapter 2. Graph Databases – Overview

In this chapter, we want to contextualize the concepts around graph databases and make our readers understand the historical and operational differences between older, different kinds of database management systems and our modern-day Neo4j installations.

To do this, we will cover the following:

• Some background information on databases in general
• A walk-through of the different approaches taken to manage and store data, from old-school navigational databases to No-SQL graph databases
• A short discussion explaining the graph database category, its strengths, and its weaknesses

This chapter should then set our readers up for some more practical discussions later in this book.