Question

Anyone help with best way to represent/query the following problem

1. products can be sold in a store, p1 -> s1, p2 -> s1, p1 -> s2 …
2. products can only be sold in a store depending on for example geographic location of store (North, South, East…) and location size (Small, Medium, Large) or combinations of store/product properties. These are constraints which drive which products will be sold in a store.

I would like to be able to ask, I am store s1 what products can I sell?

appreciate any thought on good approach to solving this problem, I was thinking a graph database such as neo4j would be appropriate but have limited experience using these so any pointers would be of value.

Answer 1

you could probably model the locations and the sizes as nodes, and connect the stores to them, then you can do queries over them with Cypher, http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/snapshot/cypher-query-lang.html, see http://tinyurl.com/d8lnvbm for an example

START p=node(1) match p-[:SOLD_IN]->store-[:LOCATED]->l, store-[:CATEGORY]->c
WHERE l.name="north" AND c.name="big" 
RETURN store