Graph Databases: An Alternative to Relational Databases in an Interconnected Big Data Environment

As the global volume of data continues to rise at an unprecedented rate, the challenges of storing and analyzing data are becoming more and more highlighted. This is especially apparent when the data are heavily interconnected. The traditional methods of storing and analyzing data such as relational databases often encounter difficulties when dealing with large amounts of data and this is even more pronounced when the data exhibits intricate interconnections. This paper examines graph databases as an alternative to relational databases in an interconnected Big Data environment. It will also show the theoretical basis behind graph databases and how they outperform relational databases in such an environment, but also why they are better suited for this kind of environment than other NoSQL alternatives. A state of the art in graph databases and how they compare to relational databases in various scenarios will also be presented in this paper.