Well, that is what I actually use most of the time, but to nitpick, it still is not declarative, and semantically a and b have no meaning. Just to be clear, I'm

Well, that is what I actually use most of the time, but to nitpick, it still is not declarative, and semantically a and b have no meaning. Just to be clear, I'm saying these are in 99% of the cases not deal breakers but they can be if all you want to do is map graphs (and follow chains through many members), as there is also a significant performance cost to all this abstraction. What you described is, IIRC, also what some file-based graph DBs do in the background with sqlite and abstract away from you (I've seen a couple custom ones in some projects). Left with a RDBMS, you just need to do it yourself and analyze how much it costs.