[sf-perl] [sfpug] Practical theory: graphs

[David Fetter]

On Thu, Dec 15, 2005 at 11:15:43AM -0800, Chris Palmer wrote:
> Like Rich, I also did not get the original message. But here goes.
> 
> > I'm looking for a practical, lay book on graph theory, especially
> > one that describes how to represent graphs in RDBMSs.
> 
> I have *Introductory Graph Theory* by Gary Chartrand (published by
> Dover). It is approachable and application-oriented, but says
> nothing about RDBMSs.
> 
> Why is it necessary to represent graphs in an RDBMS?  I can't help
> but imagine that some graph-specific presistence mechanism would be
> simpler and more performant.

I'm sure Quinn can answer this authoritatively, but I have a few
ideas.  For example, the "nodes" and "edges" might also be other kinds
of objects that fit in an RDBMS better than general graphs do, and
they might need other properties than whatever a graph-specific
storage mechanism would have.  Telephone numbers in a telco's billing
system would be an example of this.

Cheers,
D
-- 
David Fetter david at fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778

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