However, with recent focus on big data for many of my clients, we have experienced an increase in different business requests that requires for many-to-many data modelling. Consequently, as a Microsoft shop we’ve had to turn to other non-Microsoft products to ensure that we optimally respond to such business requests. Not surprisingly, ever since word got around that graph database will be part of SQL Server 2017, we’ve been looking forward to this latest release of SQL Server. Having played around with the graph database feature in SQL Server 2017, we have noticed that unlike other graph database vendors, plotting and visualising the data out of the graph database is not readily available in SQL Server 2017. Luckily, thanks to SQL Server R, you can easily plot and visualise SQL Server 2017 graph database data without turning to 3rd party plugins. In this article, I demonstrate how SQL Server Machine Learning Services (previously known as SQL Server 2016 R Services) can be used to plot a diagram according to the data defined in a SQL Server 2017 graph database.
The igraph library is a good one; there’s a lot of power in it that this post just introduces.