I Tried a Graph Database for a Week and It Blew My Mind

Why I Did This

If you’ve worked in backend development for long enough, you eventually stop thinking about your data models. Tables, foreign keys, normalized schemas — those become second nature. That’s where I was.

Until one weekend, I got curious.

I had been reading about graph databases for a while. I knew they were used in fancy places like Facebook’s friend graph, Google’s Knowledge Graph, and fraud detection systems, but I never truly understood when they made sense for everyday developers like me.

So, I set myself a challenge:
“Use a graph database for a real-world problem. No shallow tutorials. Just raw hands-on work. One week.”

What followed was an eye-opening experience that made me rethink how I approach data modeling and querying.

The Use Case: Social + Commerce

I decided to simulate a social shopping platform. Here’s what the core features looked like:

• Users can friend other users
• Users can buy products
• I want to recommend products to users based on what their friends have bought
• I want to identify “influencers” — users whose…