A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Will Graph DB provide a perfect model for PLM?

Will Graph DB provide a perfect model for PLM?
Oleg
Oleg
13 October, 2017 | 2 min for reading

Graph is a very powerful paradigm. For many years, the idea of “graph” or “connection” was empowering software engineers to develop many PDM and PLM applications. As much the conceptual model of graph is good, the realization is not perfect. Therefore, all PDM and PLM vendors are using relational databases to manage data.

Database and data management technology is going through cambrian explosion of different options and flavors. It is a result of massive amount of development coming from open source, web and other places. Database is moving from “solution” into “toolbox” status. Single database (mostly RDBMS) is no longer a straightforward decision for all your development tasks.

My old presentation about PLM and different flavors of data management, I made a point of switching from database as a platform to a database as a tool paradigm. Check my article. I’d be interested to know your opinion. Few years ago I learned about Linkurio.us and its graph visualization tools. Linkurio.us video Graph-based product lifecycle management caught my attention few days ago.

If you’re one of PLM addicts, it can be a good movie for the weekend. You can find bunch of good examples and very good “graph PLM” ideas. Here are few screenshots I captured:

An example of product data structure as a graph:

Linkurio.us user interface allowing you to browse, navigate and filter information.

Application architecture

It made me think about usefulness of total graph model for PLM. No surprise, product structure and relationships are obviously a good match to graph. But this is true for many other concepts in modern connected world – devices, social networks, cloud infrastructure. I think, graphs can solve some specific problems in Product Lifecycle Management. At the same time, I still like to idea of database as a tool and not as a platform like it is used in many existing PLM platforms developed for the lats 15-25 years.

What is my conclusion? Database as a Tool. This is a new paradigm and an outcome from large diversity of database technologies growing for the last decade. Data storage is cheap and computing power is easy to get. So, future computing systems will be using multiple data management systems to achieve the goal of reliability, flexibility and scale. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
24 January, 2018

The picture above shows 100 years old machining planning in Taber Manufacturing company. 100 years we have computers everywhere, including...

4 April, 2016

Terminology is important. You don’t want customers to get confused with the wrong term or technological buzzword. Unfortunately, some of...

4 January, 2013

3D printing is still a narrow niche play zone. In my view, we are not going to see 3D printer...

12 September, 2023

The industrial world is changing and so product lifecycle management (PLM) software. Back decades ago, PLM software was only for...

14 January, 2025

Taking a historical perspective is always an interesting experiment. I do it from time to time with my blog. In...

7 January, 2010

For the long period of time CAD/CAE/PDM/PLM were recognized as tools for product development and manufacturing. However, modern trends, moving...

15 November, 2017

Many years ago, I had a customer who asked me to develop “one button” data management application. I made a...

7 June, 2010

One of my favorite books about usability in designing of User Interfaces and Web Sites is “Don’t Make Me Think:...

12 June, 2014

The debates about cloud and PLM are in full swing. In my view, Why Cloud? is a wrong question these...

Blogroll

To the top