Use the Table Designer to Create Graph Tables in Azure Data Studio

Applies to: SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Managed Instance

Graph tables establish relationships between entities in your database using node and edge table relationships. In Azure Data Studio, you can easily create these relationships directly in the GUI without manually typing out long lines of T-SQL code. To learn more about graph tables, check out this documentation on SQL Graph Architecture. The table type can be seen in the Connections Pane by the icon shown to the left of the table name. A single dot represents a node graph table, while the two unshaded dots represent edge graph tables, as shown below:

Creating a graph table is done directly in the Properties pane. A new table has to be created to create graph tables. Graph tables can't be implemented for existing tables.

In this example below, we use the table designer GUI to create two node tables: Person, City, and an edge table called "lives" with an edge constraint to establish the relationship between the two node tables (for example: Person lives in City). For a T-SQL script version of this example, see Create a graph database and run some pattern matching queries using T-SQL.

Create the node tables

1. Create a table and name it City. Before saving this new table, in the Table Properties pane, change the Graph Table option to Node from the dropdown.

   

   The script is updated to include the "as node" syntax.

   Once this configuration is set, publish this update to the database. Once published, a new column for the node ID is created, and this ID is referenced in the script pane, as shown above.

2. Create another node table and name it Person, with the same settings as above.

Create the edge table

1. As mentioned earlier, we create our edge table, "lives." To do this, right-click on the Tables folder to create a new table. Change the name of this table from its default to "lives." To indicate that this is an edge table, select the Graph Table Type dropdown in the Table Properties pane and select "Microsoft Edge." See below.

   

2. To create the relationship between the node and edge graphs, select "Microsoft Edge Constraints." Refer to the edge constraints documentation to learn more about edge constraints. Select the plus sign next to "New Microsoft Edge Constraint" to create a new constraint. A default name for "EC-1" is provided, as seen below. Feel free to change the name for you, please. In this tutorial, we leave this as is.

   

3. As seen in the script pane in the image above, a warning indicates that a clause hasn't been specified. We must create the clause to establish the edge constraint between our Person and City node graph tables. On the "Microsoft Edge Constraint Properties" pane, under Clauses, select +New Clause. The From and To values will now appear in the clauses section. Hover over the From Table to view the dropdown, and select dbo.Persons and from the To Table drop-down, select dbo.City. Be sure to publish changes to save your work. See below for the overview of what the Table Designer view should look like after performing the above steps.

   

You can add as few or as many constraints as needed depending on the nature of the relationships between the different tables in your database.

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