Graphs play an important part in intelligent technologies such as recommendation engines, search engines, fraud detection applications, network mapping, customer journey applications, latency evaluation and dependency management. Graphs data structures are also powerful in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a few others. Graphs in the context of the social graph are used to recommend friends, events, company pages, jobs and personalise the ad experience. These are some of the use cases of graph data structures and applications. 

A quick reminder of the definition, graphs are considered to be the composition of vertices (nodes) with respective pairs of edges(also known as links or arcs). In a nutshell, they are viewed to comprise a determined set of nodes and edges which connect these given nodes. 

We are witnessing the rise and adoption of graph databases across different verticals. Gartner acknowledged the five different types of graphs as social, intent, consumption, mobile and interest. In a presentation titled: Graph All the things! Introduction to graph databases, the team from Neo4j captured Gartner’s graph classifications in the illustration below. There is a slight difference in how one of the types of a graph is named by Neo4j in comparison to Gartner. To Neo4j it is a payment graph while to Gartner it is the consumption graph.  There is the argument that a consumption graph is a better name as we do not necessarily pay for every consumption. We will now look at each graph and add some additional types

The increase in data has led to a growing need for graph databases or technologies.  With a graph database, the relationships that exist within the data can be stored, refined and queried properly. A graph database, therefore, is a database created to store data without restricting it to a pre-set model. The data in these graph-based technology expresses how each entity is related to others.

Nodes and edges are quite important when looking at graph databases as the later represents the relationship with the former. This nodes and edges setup, makes the retrieval and querying of relationships easier. Retrieving complex hierarchical structures is an advantage that these graph technologies have over relational databases. The software review forum G2 has a list of the top-rated graph databases in the market. The leading graph database technologies on G2 have had more reviews, a higher percentage of positive feedback, more data generated from other online networks and social platforms.