How to handle many to many relationships in Graph database?

Question

How to model Many-to-Many relationship in Graph databases (Property graph database)

In the below picture, Company/creditor files their claim to court when the borrower goes bankrupt and there will be an authorised representative for the each company/creditor to the case. How to model this scenario ?

Find who is representative of given creditor? Trick is creditor can have multiple claim on multiple case and multiple authorized representative.

Any suggestion ? If possible in Apache Tinkerpop Gremlin way of handling.

In neo4j graph DB this is easy to handle. It is built for such cases — nimrod serok, Sep 17 '22 at 09:08
I'm not quite clear what you are asking. Many to many can be as simple as parallel edges. — Kelvin Lawrence, Sep 18 '22 at 01:06
Parallel edge helps on many to many. However I am not able to solve this scenario. Is it good practice to make edge label as dynamic ? — Thirumal, Sep 18 '22 at 06:21
That depends on your data and you want to achieve. Generally speaking you can use a label or a property. — nimrod serok, Sep 18 '22 at 08:51
I'm not so sure what you are representing here, but if the edge is `for case 2` it is better to connect `Representative` with the case directly. Maybe the company can also be connected to the case, but not as a middleman... — nimrod serok, Sep 18 '22 at 08:54

nimrod serok · Answer 1 · 2022-09-18T09:16:17.647

Generally speaking, one option is to connect the Representative directly to the Case. This will eliminate the need to add a dynamic label (Although we don't know what you want to query yet).

On neo4j, it can be modeled like this:

MERGE (a:Representative {key: 1})
MERGE (b:Representative {key: 2})
MERGE (c:Representative {key: 3})
MERGE (d:Company{key: 1})
MERGE (e:Company{key: 2})
MERGE (f:Case{key: 1})
MERGE (g:Case{key: 2})

MERGE (a)-[:CASE]-(f)
MERGE (b)-[:CASE]-(g)
MERGE (c)-[:CASE]-(g)
MERGE (d)-[:CREDITOR]-(f)
MERGE (d)-[:CREDITOR]-(g)
MERGE (e)-[:CREDITOR]-(g)
MERGE (a)-[:CONTACT]-(d)
MERGE (b)-[:CONTACT]-(d)
MERGE (c)-[:CONTACT]-(e)

And look like this:

How to handle many to many relationships in Graph database?

1 Answers1