Manage Graphs Natively with Elixir

Elixir supports a number of packages for dealing with native graphs and for interacting with local and remote graph databases. Let’s take a closer look at some of these as we work our way through the various graph models.

libgraph package

We’ve now got some structures for code and data organization in place with an umbrella app set up, as well as some common infrastructure for storage of graphs and queries and also a common service interface for serving graphs. We’re more than ready to begin exploring graphs.

Before we start experimenting with graph databases for property and RDF graphs, we’ll first see how to represent graph data structures natively in Elixir using a native data model. With graph databases, we’re more concerned with sending queries and retrieving result sets. Here, though, we’ll have immediate access to the graphs themselves.

We’ll make use of the libgraph package by Paul Schoenfelder that allows us to do just that.

Overview

Here’s our plan: