This tweet from Scott Hanselman caught my eye because I spent nearly all of 2014 working on a graph solution for my employer that had it’s genesis in my study of Neo4J but primarily in my reading of this Microsoft Research paper (Sakr, Elnikety, and He) produced in 2012.

The essence of the Microsoft Research paper is storing edges (node relationships) in memory. So that’s what I did with unmanaged memory allocated in blocks using the Marshal.AllocHGlobal method. My own efforts were very specific with respect to my employer’s needs at the time and not really useable as a general purpose tool, so I was very pleased to see that Microsoft Research had an ongoing project called Trinity working to produce a more general purpose tool based on many of the same concepts originally explored by Sakr, Elnikety and He.

That tool was recently quietly released as the Microsoft Graph Engine. I’ve only had a little time to explore and understand it and look forward to spending more time using it soon. The essence is the same. Store the data in sequential chunks in raw unmanaged memory. Graph Engine uses Visual Studio to generate code on the fly using a meta language called Trinity Specification Language (TSL). Have a look through the documentation. If you’re considering graph database work, put Microsoft’s Graph Engine on your list of items to evaluate.