James Livingston gives us a Powershell-based implementation of Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm:
In my previous post I shared a SQL Server 2017 graph database of US capitals. Graphs are a computer science core competency and present some interesting challenges for programmers. Most notable of these challenges is finding the shortest path between nodes. Dijkstra’s algorithm is a commonly taught algorithm for finding shortest path. Dijkstra’s is often asked about during entry level developer interviews and it is a great algorithm to implement when learning a new language since it requires utilizing loops, logic, and data structures.
Here’s my implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm using PowerShell, traversing a graph of US capitals. Rather than manage our own graph nodes and edges, we’ll utilize graph tables and queries in SQL Server. There’s a lot of different ways to implement this in PowerShell, my first cut of this ended up using a hash table so I could perform random access. There’s a give-and-take with custom PowerShell objects, which sacrifice random access for some other benefits.
Click through for the code.