Graph databases are designed to handle and store data relationships as first-class entities, providing a more intuitive model for complex connected-data applications. They offer advantages such as minutes-to-milliseconds performance, drastically accelerated development cycles, extreme business responsiveness, enterprise-readiness, ACID transactionality, high availability, horizontal read scalability, and storage of billions of entities. Graph databases can reduce impedance mismatch between technical and business domains, align with agile development practices, and provide robust and scalable solutions for mission-critical applications. They are commonly used in social applications, but their use cases extend to various enterprise organizations, including fraud detection, recommendation systems, and network analysis.