Last night, Amanda, Max and I went to see Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. It was a funny movie, but funnier was the guy I met at the concession stand. He was very thin and dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt and a black vest. He looked a lot like an older Gilligan with bushy eyebrows that stood out about an inch and a half from his his forehead. He sidled up to the concession stand and peered into the candy display. "You got any.. uh... lemondrops or gumballs?" The teenager eyed him quizzically from behind the counter. "Any lemondrops?" "Uh... no." The teen looked around. "Mostly like whoppers and stuff." The man pointed at a bag. "What about that?" "Those is gummi bears" "What's that?" "You know like... gummi" "So they're gumballs?" "No, like they're ... gummi bears." The man furrowed his considerable brow. He squinted and pushed his face to the glass. "Licorice?" "No." "You know, I'll... I'll see what my lady friend wants..." He said as he backed nervously away from the counter.

There was a story about the Zen master Suzuki Roshi. This was a situation where his students had been sitting and they were 3 or 4 hours into a very hard sitting period, a sesshin. The person who told the story said every bone in his body was hurting, his back, his ankles, his neck, his head, everything hurt. Not only that, his thoughts were totally obsessed with either "I can't do this, I'm worthless. There's something wrong with me. I'm not cut out to do this." It was vacillating between those thoughts and "This whole thing is ridiculous. Why did I ever come here? These people are crazy. This place is like boot camp." His mind and body were just aching. Probably everyone else in the room was going through something similar. Suzuki Roshi came in to give the lecture for the day and he sat down. He started to talk very, very, very slowly and he said, "The difficulty that you are experiencing now..." And that man was thinking, "will go away."

And he said, "This difficulty will be with you for the rest of your life."

The Interpreter - sees role as interpreting the back end processes to the user - application is a specialized gui to the database The Modeler - sees application as data, information that needs to be structured. Starts with models and relationships, then figures out the algorithms that will bridge and transform the data. Winding road, developer's job is to build roads into and out of the database. Zen Unix Master - applications are tools in a box.

Graphs are ubiquitous. Social or P2P networks, thesauri, route planning systems, recommendation systems, collaborative filtering, even the World Wide Web itself is ultimately a graph! Given their importance, it’s surely worth spending some time in studying some algorithms and models to represent and work with them effectively. In this short article, we’re going to see how we can store a graph in a DBMS.