Which Category Is Better: Benchmarking Relational and Graph Database Management Systems

Over decades, relational database management systems (RDBMSs) have been the first choice to manage data. Recently, due to the variety properties of big data, graph database management systems (GDBMSs) have emerged as an important complement to RDBMSs. As pointed out in the existing literature, both RDBMSs and GDBMSs are capable of managing graph data and relational data; however, the boundaries of them still remain unclear. For this reason, in this paper, we first extend a unified benchmark for RDBMSs and GDBMSs over the same datasets using the same query workload under the same metrics. We then conduct extensive experiments to evaluate them and make the following findings: (1) RDBMSs outperform GDMBSs by a substantial margin under the workloads which mainly consist of group by, sort, and aggregation operations, and their combinations; (2) GDMBSs show their superiority under the workloads that mainly consist of multi-table join, pattern match, path identification, and their combinations.