We live in an era of accelerating data generation. The sizes of datasets keep growing and so does their structure. Despite the continuously growing capacity of computers real-world datasets surpass the limits of in-memory processing of even larger commercially available computers, and so data manipulation and analysis has to be aided by the use of databases. Across multiple domains, notably sociology, most interesting phenomena tend to resemble graphs rather than tables.
Graph databases, compared to their more established SQL counterparts, offer multiple advantages, due to a more natural representation of the data. Instead of tables, where each row contains a record with potentially empty fields, in graph databases, entities are vertices and relations between them are represented by edges. A well-known join operation is represented as a loop over neighbouring vertices.