Graph Databases: Introduction, Standardization, Opportunities

Graph databases are a major database paradigm next to relational databases, object databases, hierarchical databases, and so on. While there are popular standalone graph database products, some vendors from other fields including traditional SQL as well as NoSQL have begun to extend their products with graph data capabilities and interfaces. PostgreSQL has been successfully extended to support nonrelational uses such as document stores, so it is worth discussing whether and how graph database capabilities could also be integrated into PostgreSQL.

At the moment, the graph database world suffers from an overabundance of different query languages. There are, however, efforts underway to unify some of these and standardize them under the umbrella of standardization organizations such as W3C and ISO. This would make it easier for products such as PostgreSQL, whose primary focus is not graph data, to add support for graph data query languages without having to worry about competing languages and standards. I'll try to sort through this and show what is currently going on in graph database languages.