Are you an adventurer? Do you want gold? Experience? Of course you do! And where do you get these things? The dungeon, where else? That wonderful container of all things adventurous! Unfortunately, dungeons aren't setup for your convenience and so you have to wander about and you get what you get.

But you’re also a developer. You could put all the rooms with their shiny and monstrous content in a database. You could query it and find the best routes to get the gold and the experience. But how would you model this data and write these queries? The rooms. The monsters. The sparkling hoozits. That’s a lot of entities to relate to each other. And that’s gonna be a monster of a JOIN! Better get my text editor ready.

You could use a graph database that allows you to model these relationships simply with nodes and edges. And, using the Cypher query language, you can write elegant queries that find the best routes to get the stuff you desire most.

In this talk, I’ll use this example to introduce you to graph databases. I’ll compare how to model it with a relational database and how a graph database makes it easier. I’ll show you how to query and modify your graph. And, as no talk would be complete without a live demo, I’ll do it all using a real-time procedurally generated random dungeon (I am a dungeon master after all).

So come, have a flagon of mead as you learn about graph databases, optimize your dungeon crawl, and equip another weapon in your quest for better software!