Property Graph Techniques in Relational Databases

Malcolm Crowe; Fritz Laux

Property Graph Techniques in Relational Databases

Databases 2026-08-11 v1

Authors: Malcolm Crowe , Fritz Laux

Abstract

Current developments in standardization activities for database management systems include the development of the next versions of the Structured Query Language (SQL), and related standards for labelled property graphs. This short paper explores mechanisms for unified implementation of record-based relational and property graph databases: its contribution is that modeling SQL foreign keys as reference keys facilitates the graph insert and advanced pattern matching mechanisms of Property Graph Database Management Systems (PGDMS) and allows the construction of multiple type graph models on a single relational database.

Keywords

property graphs relational databases SQL foreign keys graph databases unified implementation

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.11001,
  title  = {Property Graph Techniques in Relational Databases},
  author = {Malcolm Crowe and Fritz Laux},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.11001},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure