MySQL vs. Neo4j on a Large-Scale Graph Traversal
[…] given a breadth-first traversal of an artificial graph with natural statistics, the graph database Neo4j is more optimal than the relational database MySQL. However, no attempts have been made to optimize the Java VM, the SQL queries, etc. These experiments were run with both Neo4j and MySQL “out of the box” and with a “natural syntax” for both types of queries.
Couple of notes (beside the above disclaimer)
- the first concern is that data placed in MySQL was not modeled for the problem at hand. So, a graph database would have an immediate advantage
- I don’t think the warm up phase (nb
SELECT *and iterate over results) was really useful for MySQL
Bottom line, while I would expect a graph database to always perform better for these scenarios, I think there are ways to improve the results on relational DB.
