I am developing a diagramming application and want to optimize operations with the Nodes and Relations of the diagram. Currently, I am using a relational database with tables for diagrams and nodes. Each node entity has a field children containing the IDs of its child nodes, which forms the relationships. This architecture seems far from ideal to me, so I am curious whether I would gain a performance boost in operations with the diagram elements by using a graph database. I am referring to operations such as retrieving all nodes for a specific diagram, modifying nodes, relationships, etc.

At first glance, it seems that the inherent nature of graph databases should naturally fit this task. But most examples in the documentation cover more typical scenarios such as building recommendation systems and other similar applications. And maybe I’m missing something.