The Good, The Bad, and the Hype about Graph Databases for MDM

Excitement about new technology entering the market is not uncommon. New trends constantly come and go, sometimes without even being noticed. For information leaders, business strategists, and emerging technology teams, it is critical to keep an eye on developing trends so they can apply best practices for their company and stakeholders.

However, some trends tend to be more hype than practicality.

Gartner came up with the concept of a hype cycle for emerging technologies to show how technologies move from innovation trigger to inflated expectations, a trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and finally to the plateau of productivity.

The master data management (MDM) space is no exception when it comes to such hype -- and the latest MDM buzz is graph databases.

Small startups are pushing graph databases as the end-all be-all for MDM because that's all they can offer. While graph offers some attractive benefits for an MDM solution, it's important to take a step back and consider the drawbacks as well.

This article offers practical and technical insights so you can make informed decisions about your MDM implementation. Let's start by examining the hype and explain the strengths as well as the drawbacks of graph databases that could negatively impact MDM efforts.

The graph databases are often pitched as the perfect solution for MDM. Graph does offer advantages to data consumption use cases that rely on relationship traversal. However, those use cases are limited. When compared to MDM solutions with a fixed, prebuilt data model (such as Oracle UCM or IBM's Advanced Edition), graph databases certainly provide some functional improvements (listed below). However, the flexibility of the technology itself is overhyped, given the nature of the problems MDM solves.

Many emerging vendors highlight their graph database with a persistence layer that allows them to do Facebook and LinkedIn-like relationship management. However, anyone who has ever been involved with an MDM project knows that maintaining data relationships in a persistence layer is not the objective, as it's not a major roadblock or pain point.

Let's zoom in on some of the good and bad aspects of graph databases.