I have a directed graph (nodes and edges) that I want to store
"efficiently": given two nodes, I want to quickly find the shortest
path between them. The graph is NOT acyclic (it's not a tree), is
fairly "sparse" (about 10000 edges for 2500 nodes), and changes
occasionally.
I know PostgreSQL/MySQL can store graphs (as one table of nodes and
one table of edges that reference the nodes), but I think finding the
shortest path between two nodes is quite inefficient that way.
I know PostgreSQL/MySQL have special "plugins" (like PostGIS for
PostgreSQL) for specific problems. Is there a directed graph plugin?
I'm not married to using SQL: are there other efficient solutions to
store directed graphs? Could I hack something up in Perl or Ruby and
then serialize my in-memory graph to a file (for efficient
saving/reloading)?
As a minor note, the nodes/edges will have (non-unique) names and
descriptions, and I want the ability to do fulltext searching on these
names/descriptions. However, this is less important than quickly
finding the shortest path between two nodes.
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