Efficient way to implement LinkedIn like “How you are connected to” feature?

Question

LinkedIn has this cool feature in which while visiting some user\'s profile, LinkedIn prompts how you are connecting to that user through the network.

Assuming that the

Answer 1

You can see how this can be done in the article Graphs in the database: SQL meets social networks by Lorenzo Alberton. The example code is written for PostgreSQL using CTEs. However, I doubt that using a RDBMS for this will perform well. I wrote up an article on how to do the same stuff as in the mentioned article using a native graph database, in this case Neo4j: Social networks in the database: using a graph database. Other than the differences in performance, a graph database also simplifies the task by providing a graph API that makes it easy to handle traversals that would be extremely complex to write in SQL (or by using stored procedures). I wrote a bit more on graph databases in this thread and see this one too.