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In the past I used recursive CTEs in Postgres to calculate the BOM of a product. Products consisted of "parts", and each "part" had a cost and could consist of any number of other "parts" (subassemblies). This was for a homemade ERP resembling software.

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While the end result looks like a graph, I think that still qualifies as a standard relational DB use case though?

A graph database usually means you’re storing the graph nodes and edges as entities, so you can traverse the graph easily from any direction, and express different kinds of relationships.

Yeah, wasn't trying to say this was an example of graph. Maybe it is slightly outside what would be considered "standard" relational DB use case? My impression of recursive CTE's in RDBMS is that if you need speed or any more advanced graph-like features, you should move to an actual graph db. So far I haven't taken on any projects that warranted that, though it does interest me.

Either way my intention here was to simply provide an example of a real-world recursive CTE use case.

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