Steve Jones creates a simple graph relationship in SQL Server 2017:
What does all that mean? No idea. Clearly there is JSON that’s returned here and can be deserialized to gather meanings. Is this useful? I think graphs solve a certain set of problems very well, and more efficiently than relational systems. Certainly I could implement a graph structure relationally, but at scale I’m not sure the queries would be as easy to write or run as quickly.
I don’t know if I’d use a graph structure in any of the problems we try to solve in the SQLServerCentral app, but who knows. Maybe we would if we could.
Steve leaves this with more questions than answers, but he does give a very simple repro script if you want to futz about with graphs.