In my last blog, I built some Powershell to take a graph that I had modelled and bring that into SQL Server in a format that could be imported into SQL Server node and edge tables. I have started on a tool to take that imported data and create a set of graph tables to test with, but to test that process, I found it kind of important to be able to visualize a graph to make sure it worked! I considered using a rich format like Arvind Shyamsundar dis in his blog: (https://deep.data.blog/2017/11/03/how-we-did-it-pass-2017-summit-session-similarity-using-sql-graph-and-python/) by outputting GraphML, but that was kind of overkill since every time I import a set of nodes, I will have to reformat anyhow. It turned out to be much easier to build generic code using TGF (Trivial Graph Format) just like in my export example. Another goal of mine is to make this tool to work with any graph in SQL Server (I am currently building an some code to do just that to categorize geographies, so this is a double win) so I used dynamic SQL as the basis, so I could pick and choose the node and edge tables, plus dynamically set a column for the nodes to display. (A future enhancement will be to include a filter on the node value so you can just see how a few nodes are related.)

I did some searching for some sample graph data in SQL Server objects, and I found this example on the docs.microsoft.com site. It contains a complete database with 3 nodes and 3 edges that gave me something to output. This code should work on 2017 or 2019 equally well.

#graph #sql graph #sql server #sql