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I read pgRouting as focusing on Geospacial routing to get from point A to point B. Is there more to it than that? A graph database is about storing data that t
by crad 6y ago
I read pgRouting as focusing on Geospacial routing to get from point A to point B. Is there more to it than that?
A graph database is about storing data that the relationships between pieces of data, like a social graph as an example. You'd have a people and the relationships between them in the database.
- derefr 6y agoDespite the description on its website, at core, there's nothing particularly geospatial about pgRouting. You don't need PostGIS, or even Postgres's built-in geo types (point, line, etc.), in order to use pgRouting. Rather, pgRouting is a set of general graph- and path-search algorithms, exposed as procedures, that operate upon rowsets (most efficiently, upon indexed tables) of vertices and edges. You can use pgRouting to do SPARQL-like graph queries, or even full-blown network analysis, if you like. In a previous job, I did just that: I loaded up social-network data into vertex and edge tables, and then I used pgRouting's implementation of Floyd-Warshall and Driving Distance to discover high-value potential social connections within a given relationship-weighted distance of a given user. Not as a one-time data-science thing, but as the backend of our service's matching engine, that ran every time a user refreshed their "candidate matches" page. It was pretty instantaneous.
- nathcd 6y agoI remember wondering about exactly this a couple years ago, but I couldn't figure out the answer (I didn't look all that closely into it). Now I want to come up with an excuse to try it out on something. Thanks for mentioning this!
- yowlingcat 6y agoWow, this is super neat. I wish I knew about this a couple years ago, it would've been super useful for a recommendation system I was building in production. I'll have to give this a shot!