Mala Mahadevan takes us through family histories in a graph database:
I have been working a lot of SQL Graph related queries and applications of the graph data concept to the extent possible within SQL Server’s graph capabilities. Genealogy, or querying family trees is an important graph data application. A lot of us may not have work related applications that are genealogy related, necessarily. But conceptually, this can apply to many similar tree/hierarchy type structures. I was looking into some data to play with in this regard. Sometime ago – we were discussing novels by famed novelist James Michener. My friend Buck Woody made a tweet-remark that it would need a graph database to keep track of the characters and relationships in some of Michener’s novels. I am a big fan of Michener’s novels, and the most recent one I have read is ‘Hawaii’. It is based on history and evolution of the Hawaiian islands, and has a rather complex network of characters, with many ethnicities and several interwoven relationships. I decided to use the characters in Hawaii as my test data to understand how to query geneological data, stored in graph database format.
Read on to see Mala’s table and a procedure to retrieve this data.