Square Pegs and Round Holes in the NOSQL World
Jim Webber reviews why graph databases (such as Neo4J) are better for storing graphs than Key-Value, Document or relational datastores.
He concludes:
In these kind of situations, choosing a non-graph store for storing graphs is a gamble. You may find that you’ve designed your graph topology far too early in the system lifecycle and lose the ability to evolve the structure and perform business intelligence on your data. That’s why Neo4j is cool – it keeps graph and application concerns separate, and allows you to defer data modelling decisions to more responsible points throughout the lifetime of your application.
You know, we could say the same thing about topic maps, that you don’t have to commit to all modeling decisions up front.
Something to think about.