
Whatever your views on the game Monopoly, you play by getting properties, changing them and making sure anybody that uses them pays a tidy sum. That’s also true of graph databases. Finding a property, changing a property, filtering on a property and sometimes even retrieving properties can be really expensive. Part of the issue is that it was decided at some point that it would be great if any nodes of the same label could have different properties and if they had the same property keys, they didn’t necessarily have to have the same property types. This mean one Person node could have a height property and the other not. One node’s height property could be an integer representing inches or centimeters while another could use a float and another just write out “170 cm” or ” 5 foot 6″ as strings. Dealing with properties was completely left to the developer. Many times, there isn’t even an option to enforce property types.
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