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Comment by GrowingSideways | Hacker News Reader

In addition to the sibling comment, you might also consider simply not using the APIs or SQL queries to begin with. Many people have entire careers without touching either.

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Why would I ever consider doing that?

That's up to you. Why ask me?

I think you're failing to get that using a filesystem API to work with things that aren't naturally anything like filesystems might get perverse. And standard filesystems are a pretty unnatural way to lay out information anyway, given that they force everything into a tree structure.

This is what I was trying to get at. A lot of the data I deal with is directed, cyclic graphs. Actually, I personally think most data sets we care about are actually directed graphs of some kind, but we've gotten so used to thinking of them as trees that we force the metaphor too far. I mean, file systems are an excellent example of a thing we actually want to be a graph but we've forced into being a tree. Because otherwise why would we have ever invented symlinks?

There's a bunch of literature about accessing graphs through tree lenses. I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for.

SQL certainly forces you to look at graphs as trees. Do you have an specific interface you're trying to access? If you're trying to use a graph database, why mention APIs and SQL?

I just assumed they wanted to interface with existing json over http apis rather than write their own code. The sibling of my previous comment addresses that concern.

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