Methods and apparatus for representing and querying storage area network (SAN) topology

A topology representation stores the topology in database tables corresponding to a topology schema for representing the manageable entities and relations in the SAN. A management application performs topology manipulations via database queries operable to process the database tables representing the topology, thus avoiding loading the entire topology into memory. Accordingly, configurations herein need not store the entire topology representation in order to process the topology by performing relational database queries that effectively perform the topology processing via the database query engine rather than a memory resident data structure.