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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
0.00015939766
Overall Rank
847 | 94.12%
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
341 EmptyHeaded: A Relational Engine for Graph Processing 2016 SIGMOD 0.00026850764
1,424 LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans 2020 VLDB 0.00012044472
1,751 Weld: A Common Runtime for High Performance Data Analytics 2017 CIDR 0.00010673874
1,921 Selecting Subexpressions to Materialize at Datacenter Scale 2018 VLDB 0.00010085899
2,201 LDBC Graphalytics: A Benchmark for Large-Scale Graph Analysis on Parallel and Distributed Platforms 2016 VLDB 9.3042485e-05
2,777 Quickstep: A Data Platform Based on the Scaling-Up Approach 2018 VLDB 8.1346418e-05
2,910 Teseo and the Analysis of Structural Dynamic Graphs 2021 VLDB 7.9276339e-05
3,147 Extracting and Analyzing Hidden Graphs from Relational Databases 2017 SIGMOD 7.4825501e-05
3,716 Saga: A Platform for Continuous Construction and Serving of Knowledge At Scale 2022 SIGMOD 6.8170433e-05
3,984 All-in-One: Graph Processing in RDBMSs Revisited 2017 SIGMOD 6.5587512e-05
4,345 GRFusion: Graphs as First-Class Citizens in Main-Memory Relational Database Systems 2018 SIGMOD 6.2594514e-05
4,574 Beyond Macrobenchmarks: Microbenchmark-based Graph Database Evaluation 2019 VLDB 6.0663571e-05
5,563 Big Graphs: Challenges and Opportunities 2022 VLDB 5.4328211e-05
5,813 GraphGen: Exploring Interesting Graphs in Relational Data 2015 VLDB 5.3161293e-05
5,898 IBM Db2 Graph: Supporting Synergistic and Retrofittable Graph Queries Inside IBM Db2 2020 SIGMOD 5.2808882e-05
6,646 Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F' 2020 SIGMOD 4.9734285e-05
6,983 CompressGraph: Efficient Parallel Graph Analytics with Rule-Based Compression 2023 SIGMOD 4.8682622e-05
7,139 A Graph Database for a Virtualized Network Infrastructure 2018 SIGMOD 4.8154459e-05
7,367 Using VDMS to Index and Search 100M Images 2021 VLDB 4.7459078e-05
7,592 Using Domain-Specific Languages For Analytic Graph Databases 2016 VLDB 4.6985656e-05
7,688 Experimental Analysis of Distributed Graph Systems 2018 VLDB 4.6735925e-05
8,228 You Say 'What', I Hear 'Where' and 'Why' - (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance 2018 VLDB 4.549777e-05
8,282 Knowledge Graph Exploration Systems: are we lost? 2022 CIDR 4.5392079e-05
9,793 Chimera: A system design of dual storage and traversal-join unified query processing for SQL/PGQ 2025 VLDB 4.2777144e-05
10,487 Dangers of List Processing in Querying Property Graphs 2025 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,483 Vertex-centric Parallel Computation of SQL Queries 2021 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,788 Virtualized Network Service Topology Exploration Using Nepal 2017 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,882 Graph-based Exploration of Non-graph Datasets 2016 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
11,883 Rogas: A Declarative Framework for Network Analytics 2016 VLDB 4.1905499e-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 0.0019040811
153 Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities 1999 VLDB 0.00040759404
1,323 Distributed SociaLite: A Datalog-Based Language for Large-Scale Graph Analysis 2013 VLDB 0.00012595443
1,410 An Experimental Comparison of Pregel-like Graph Processing Systems 2014 VLDB 0.00012127229
2,486 Large-Scale Graph Analytics in Aster 6: Bringing Context to Big Data Discovery 2014 VLDB 8.6644935e-05
2,711 Vertexica: Your Relational Friend for Graph Analytics! 2014 VLDB 8.2548656e-05
5,003 Graph Queries in a Next-Generation Datalog System 2013 VLDB 5.7606385e-05
5,585 Teaching an Old Elephant New Tricks 2009 CIDR 5.4196973e-05
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Overall Rank Paper Year Venue Pagerank
8,487 Making RDBMSs Efficient on Graph Workloads Through Predefined Joins 2022 VLDB 4.4953604e-05
3,147 Extracting and Analyzing Hidden Graphs from Relational Databases 2017 SIGMOD 7.4825501e-05
2,128 SQLGraph: An Efficient Relational-Based Property Graph Store 2015 SIGMOD 9.4804485e-05
6,640 Modern Techniques for Querying Graph-Structured Relations: Foundations, System Implementations, and Open Challenges 2022 VLDB 4.9753538e-05
341 EmptyHeaded: A Relational Engine for Graph Processing 2016 SIGMOD 0.00026850764
8,394 Optimizing Declarative Graph Queries at Large Scale 2019 SIGMOD 4.5233733e-05
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3,984 All-in-One: Graph Processing in RDBMSs Revisited 2017 SIGMOD 6.5587512e-05
7,592 Using Domain-Specific Languages For Analytic Graph Databases 2016 VLDB 4.6985656e-05
7,759 G-SQL: Fast Query Processing via Graph Exploration 2016 VLDB 4.6549638e-05