Hierarchies and graphs are the bread and butter of most business applications and you find them almost everywhere:

* Product Categories

* Sales Territories

* Bill of Material

* Networks

Even when there is a big need from a business perspective, the solutions in relational databases are mostly sort of awkward. The most flexible hierarchies are usually modeled as self-referenced tables. If you want to successfully query such self-referenced hierarchies, you will need either loops or recursive Common Table Expressions. SQL Server 2017 comes now with a different approach: Graph Database. 

Join this session for a journey through best practices to transform your hierarchies into useful information. We will have fun playing around with a sample database based on G. R. R. Martin’s famous “Game of Thrones”.