OQGRAPH: Dealing with graphs and hierarchies in plain SQL

We have graphs for social networking and other complex structures, and some specialised tools to store and traverse them. But all our other data is in our SQL RDBMS with a convenient familiar API! Oh dear...

And we all know that SQL databases are unsuitable for handling these types of structures! Or are they? Well, not quite. Some can do this stuff, just as efficiently as a native graph store - because well, they are equally native, but with the convenient SQL interface and ability to join on to your other data. Isn't that something?

Arjen shows the OQGRAPH engine which he designed, which works in MySQL 5.0 and beyond and was integrated into the MariaDB 5.2 branch of MySQL. He shows exactly how the engine works (the code is all GPL) and what kinds of funky things you can now do!