A GRAPH DATABASE APPROACH TO MANAGING DATA WITH UNPREDICTABLE SCHEMA IN ACADEMIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT
Ștefan Uifălean, Gheorghe Cosmin Silaghi, Robert Andrei Buchmann · International Conference on Informatics in Economy · 2019
Modelling information systems that are based on ever-evolving data, from both the size and the structure point of view proves to be a challenging software engineering undertaking.With a traditional relational database, any change in the data structure will propagate through the entire architecture of the software solution, requesting a lot of work both in the design and the implementation of the software product.With the advances of the graph databases, storing and using schema-less data that specifies relationships at instance level became a handy alternative.This paper presents a proof-of-concept solution for intuitively modelling interconnected elements and using them as a knowledge-base for an information system.By integrating a Neo4J store in a Spring Boot MVC application, we show how we can overcome the software engineering process problems when schema change requests are frequently propagated and how we can induce flexibility in both the data design and application development.