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Re:Ask HN: What was your experience using a graph database? by chadcmulligan on Monday December 31, 2018 @06:46PM (#18797871)
I've implemented graphs and trees in a relational DB quite a few times. For graphs you can just store an adjacency list. I think most of the large DB's now have tree traversal extensions to SQL (I know Oracle does). If you need to manipulate on the server then PL/Sql (or equivalent) can do the job.

The only time I could imagine that you'd need a specialist graph database would be if you had a very large number of nodes and some time / space intensive algorithm to run over them. Even in this case you could just store the data in a relational DB and use a low level interface (e.g. C) to write the specialist algorithm.

Re:Ask HN: What was your experience using a graph database? by MichaelMoser123 on Monday December 31, 2018 @08:13PM (#18798260)
Yes, you need a nosql graph databases only for applications that require eventual consistency - and that's a hard thing to get right in any case; an application can do without that if does not have to scale to a very large user base.

In any case putting the graph nodes and links into sql tables is a much easier to do option.