COMBINING MERKLE TREES IN GRAPH DATABASES

Combining a Merkle tree with a graph database by defining a Merkle tree with each node having a hashed value of the metadata for the node and any children of that node, associating non-hashed data with the hashed data for each node, wherein the non-hashed data has an up-pointer from a child node to any of its immediate parent node, and defining bi-directional edges between the nodes of the Merkle tree having a graph database structure to create a reference for the up-pointers associated with each Merkle tree node. The bi-directional edges with up-pointers along with the Merkle tree hash scheme allows efficient traversal of the tree where the hash values indicate non-changed nodes to prevent traversing the database, and further allows efficient path definitions by allowing database processes to walk up edges.