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The case against specialized graph analytics engines

Summary: Argues that specialized graph engines are often unnecessary for enterprises by presenting Grail, a vertex-centric syntactic layer that compiles graph queries into SQL to run atop existing RDBMSs. Single-node comparisons with GraphLab/Giraph show competitive performance, leveraging RDBMS maturity and admin infrastructure. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
263
Venue
CIDR
Year
2015
Pagerank
0.0001594441
Overall Rank
851 | 94.09%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 29 of 29 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
342 EmptyHeaded: A Relational Engine for Graph Processing 2016 SIGMOD 0.00026795977
1,426 LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans 2020 VLDB 0.00012050977
1,750 Weld: A Common Runtime for High Performance Data Analytics 2017 CIDR 0.00010683647
1,922 Selecting Subexpressions to Materialize at Datacenter Scale 2018 VLDB 0.00010082599
2,200 LDBC Graphalytics: A Benchmark for Large-Scale Graph Analysis on Parallel and Distributed Platforms 2016 VLDB 9.3075881e-05
2,772 Quickstep: A Data Platform Based on the Scaling-Up Approach 2018 VLDB 8.1401661e-05
2,905 Teseo and the Analysis of Structural Dynamic Graphs 2021 VLDB 7.9352789e-05
3,143 Extracting and Analyzing Hidden Graphs from Relational Databases 2017 SIGMOD 7.4804326e-05
3,711 Saga: A Platform for Continuous Construction and Serving of Knowledge At Scale 2022 SIGMOD 6.823609e-05
3,988 All-in-One: Graph Processing in RDBMSs Revisited 2017 SIGMOD 6.5589605e-05
4,360 GRFusion: Graphs as First-Class Citizens in Main-Memory Relational Database Systems 2018 SIGMOD 6.256733e-05
4,581 Beyond Macrobenchmarks: Microbenchmark-based Graph Database Evaluation 2019 VLDB 6.0703328e-05
5,805 GraphGen: Exploring Interesting Graphs in Relational Data 2015 VLDB 5.3203552e-05
5,907 IBM Db2 Graph: Supporting Synergistic and Retrofittable Graph Queries Inside IBM Db2 2020 SIGMOD 5.2776711e-05
5,941 Big Graphs: Challenges and Opportunities 2022 VLDB 5.2635446e-05
6,645 Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F' 2020 SIGMOD 4.978205e-05
6,985 CompressGraph: Efficient Parallel Graph Analytics with Rule-Based Compression 2023 SIGMOD 4.8729387e-05
7,143 A Graph Database for a Virtualized Network Infrastructure 2018 SIGMOD 4.8191495e-05
7,369 Using VDMS to Index and Search 100M Images 2021 VLDB 4.750437e-05
7,589 Using Domain-Specific Languages For Analytic Graph Databases 2016 VLDB 4.7030207e-05
7,687 Experimental Analysis of Distributed Graph Systems 2018 VLDB 4.677974e-05
8,230 You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance 2018 VLDB 4.5541444e-05
8,289 Knowledge Graph Exploration Systems: are we lost? 2022 CIDR 4.5435639e-05
9,790 Chimera: A system design of dual storage and traversal-join unified query processing for SQL/PGQ 2025 VLDB 4.2818172e-05
10,477 Dangers of List Processing in Querying Property Graphs 2025 SIGMOD 4.1945683e-05
11,479 Vertex-centric Parallel Computation of SQL Queries 2021 SIGMOD 4.1945683e-05
11,780 Virtualized Network Service Topology Exploration Using Nepal 2017 SIGMOD 4.1945683e-05
11,874 Graph-based Exploration of Non-graph Datasets 2016 VLDB 4.1945683e-05
11,875 Rogas: A Declarative Framework for Network Analytics 2016 VLDB 4.1945683e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
4 Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing 2010 SIGMOD 0.0019005923
153 Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities 1999 VLDB 0.00040784455
1,294 Distributed SociaLite: A Datalog-Based Language for Large-Scale Graph Analysis 2013 VLDB 0.00012779484
1,408 An Experimental Comparison of Pregel-like Graph Processing Systems 2014 VLDB 0.00012133511
2,487 Large-Scale Graph Analytics in Aster 6: Bringing Context to Big Data Discovery 2014 VLDB 8.6710828e-05
2,709 Vertexica: Your Relational Friend for Graph Analytics! 2014 VLDB 8.2530203e-05
5,003 Graph Queries in a Next-Generation Datalog System 2013 VLDB 5.7652482e-05
5,580 Teaching an Old Elephant New Tricks 2009 CIDR 5.4242682e-05
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3,988 All-in-One: Graph Processing in RDBMSs Revisited 2017 SIGMOD 6.5589605e-05
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