Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
• Is there redundancy throughout the network for the most important customers?
Graph database solutions complement existing network management and analysis
tools. As with master data management, they can be used to bring together data from
disparate inventory systems, providing a single view of the network and its consumers,
from the smallest network element all the way to application and services and the cus‐
tomers who use them. A graph database representation of the network can also be used
to enrich operational intelligence based on event correlations: whenever an event cor‐
relation engine [a
Complex Event Processor
,
for example] infers a complex event from
a stream of low-level network events, it can assess the impact of that event using the
graph model, and thereafter trigger any necessary compensating or mitigating actions.
Today, graph databases are being successfully employed in the areas of telecommuni‐
cations, network management and analysis, cloud platform management, data center
and IT asset management, and network impact analysis, where they are reducing impact
analysis and problem resolution times from days and hours down to minutes and sec‐
onds. Performance, flexibility in the face of changing network schemas, and fit for the
domain are all important factors here.
Authorization and Access Control (Communications)
Authorization and access control solutions store information about parties (e.g., ad‐
ministrators, organizational units, end-users) and resources (e.g., files, shares, network
devices, products, services, agreements), together with the rules governing access to
those resources; they then apply these rules to determine who can access or manipulate
a resource. Access control has traditionally been implemented either using directory
services or by building a custom solution inside an application's backend. Hierarchical
directory structures, however, cannot cope with the nonhierarchical organizational and
resource dependency structures that characterize multiparty distributed supply chains.
Hand-rolled solutions, particularly those developed on a relational database, suffer join
pain as the dataset size grows, becoming slow and unresponsive, and ultimately deliv‐
ering a poor end-user experience.
A graph database can store complex, densely connected access control structures span‐
ning billions of parties and resources. Its structured yet schema-free data model sup‐
ports both hierarchical and nonhierarchical structures, while its extensible property
model allows for capturing rich metadata regarding every element in the system. With
a query engine that can traverse millions of relationships per second, access lookups
over large, complex structures execute in milliseconds.
As with network management and analysis, a graph database access control solution
allows for both top-down and bottom-up queries:
• Which resources—company structures, products, services, agreements, and end
users—can a particular administrator manage? (Top-down)
