foreword

At the dawn of a new decade, developers are confronted with a myriad of database options when beginning a new project. The stalwart relational database still rules the roost, maintaining popularity in both legacy and greenfield projects. This is for good reason; flexibility and forty plus years of cumulative engineering history are hard to argue with. Despite the success of relational databases, the last decade saw an explosion of new commercial and open-source database systems that were designed around alternative models and query languages. Some tackle traditional RDBMS workloads with a new twist, perhaps focusing horizontal scale out or high performance via the embrace of in-memory optimization that have become available due to decreases in RAM prices. Many other systems diverged from the relational model altogether. Out of this set, we find a variety of focus areas and modeling paradigms. This book focuses on one of the more expressive and powerful developments, the graph model, and the property graph in particular.