[perlin]

Neo4j, and graph databases in general, are an excellent use case for IoT access management.

Our schema involved taking physical assets/personnel and representing them as different labels: machine, factory, production line, user, usergroup, etc. We then drew complex relationships between different user/groups in the organization and the assets they were responsible for.

At first, we used a relational database, but it soon became difficult to go more granular than simply: user belongs to usergroup, usergroup belongs to client, client has factories, factories have lines, lines have machines.

As many have pointed out here, it's not that you can't do this with non-graph databases, it just requires a more complex query layer. Neo4j allowed us to represent complex business relationships as natural language, and that really helped us as the business scaled.