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: haaa95a8e1e64fc43
Venue: CIDR
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 0.00014037973
Overall Rank: 780 | 94.76%
DOI: -
PDF: Download (CC BY 3.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jing Fan (University of Wisconsin)
2. Adalbert Gerald (University of Wisconsin)
3. Soosai Raj (University of Wisconsin)
4. Jignesh M. Patel (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{fan_cidr15,
        address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands},
        series = {{CIDR} '15},
        title = {{The case against specialized graph analytics engines}},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {Conference} on {Innovative} {Data} {Systems} {Research}},
        author = {Fan, Jing and Gerald, Adalbert and Raj, Soosai and Patel, Jignesh M.},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 29 of 29 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
208	EmptyHeaded: A Relational Engine for Graph Processing	2016	SIGMOD	0.00024899872
1,193	Weld: A Common Runtime for High Performance Data Analytics	2017	CIDR	0.00011582619
1,281	LiveGraph: A Transactional Graph Storage System with Purely Sequential Adjacency List Scans	2020	VLDB	0.00011218311
1,486	LDBC Graphalytics: A Benchmark for Large-Scale Graph Analysis on Parallel and Distributed Platforms	2016	VLDB	0.00010517584
1,747	Selecting Subexpressions to Materialize at Datacenter Scale	2018	VLDB	9.7303647e-05
2,032	Teseo and the Analysis of Structural Dynamic Graphs	2021	VLDB	9.1549024e-05
2,139	Quickstep: A Data Platform Based on the Scaling-Up Approach	2018	VLDB	8.9735524e-05
2,918	Extracting and Analyzing Hidden Graphs from Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD	7.8546643e-05
3,015	Saga: A Platform for Continuous Construction and Serving of Knowledge At Scale	2022	SIGMOD	7.7504975e-05
3,801	All-in-One: Graph Processing in RDBMSs Revisited	2017	SIGMOD	7.0128676e-05
4,071	Beyond Macrobenchmarks: Microbenchmark-based Graph Database Evaluation	2019	VLDB	6.8182854e-05
4,430	GRFusion: Graphs as First-Class Citizens in Main-Memory Relational Database Systems	2018	SIGMOD	6.6000772e-05
5,095	GraphGen: Exploring Interesting Graphs in Relational Data	2015	VLDB	6.2764548e-05
5,516	Big Graphs: Challenges and Opportunities	2022	VLDB	6.0957673e-05
5,832	IBM Db2 Graph: Supporting Synergistic and Retrofittable Graph Queries Inside IBM Db2	2020	SIGMOD	5.9754821e-05
6,402	Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'	2020	SIGMOD	5.7953646e-05
6,529	CompressGraph: Efficient Parallel Graph Analytics with Rule-Based Compression	2023	SIGMOD	5.7532491e-05
7,288	Experimental Analysis of Distributed Graph Systems	2018	VLDB	5.5632324e-05
7,763	Using Domain-Specific Languages For Analytic Graph Databases	2016	VLDB	5.4559829e-05
7,781	A Graph Database for a Virtualized Network Infrastructure	2018	SIGMOD	5.4528134e-05
7,823	You Say ‘What’, I Hear ‘Where’ and ‘Why’ — (Mis-)Interpreting SQL to Derive Fine-Grained Provenance	2018	VLDB	5.4441002e-05
7,901	Using VDMS to Index and Search 100M Images	2021	VLDB	5.4291648e-05
8,695	Knowledge Graph Exploration Systems: are we lost?	2022	CIDR	5.2880532e-05
10,132	Chimera: A system design of dual storage and traversal-join unified query processing for SQL/PGQ	2025	VLDB	5.0727027e-05
11,190	Dangers of List Processing in Querying Property Graphs	2025	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
11,990	Vertex-centric Parallel Computation of SQL Queries	2021	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,289	Virtualized Network Service Topology Exploration Using Nepal	2017	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05
12,374	Graph-based Exploration of Non-graph Datasets	2016	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,375	Rogas: A Declarative Framework for Network Analytics	2016	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

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
3	Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing	2010	SIGMOD	0.0012087459
141	Relational Databases for Querying XML Documents: Limitations and Opportunities	1999	VLDB	0.0002928095
1,310	An Experimental Comparison of Pregel-like Graph Processing Systems	2014	VLDB	0.00011063446
1,550	Distributed SociaLite: A Datalog-Based Language for Large-Scale Graph Analysis	2013	VLDB	0.00010285521
2,356	Vertexica: Your Relational Friend for Graph Analytics!	2014	VLDB	8.5852943e-05
2,512	Large-Scale Graph Analytics in Aster 6: Bringing Context to Big Data Discovery	2014	VLDB	8.3650425e-05
4,836	Graph Queries in a Next-Generation Datalog System	2013	VLDB	6.3856256e-05
6,040	Teaching an Old Elephant New Tricks	2009	CIDR	5.9051168e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	8,648	Making RDBMSs Efficient on Graph Workloads Through Predefined Joins	2022	VLDB
2	2,918	Extracting and Analyzing Hidden Graphs from Relational Databases	2017	SIGMOD
3	1,601	SQLGraph: An Efficient Relational-Based Property Graph Store	2015	SIGMOD
4	6,487	Modern Techniques for Querying Graph-Structured Relations: Foundations, System Implementations, and Open Challenges	2022	VLDB
5	208	EmptyHeaded: A Relational Engine for Graph Processing	2016	SIGMOD
6	8,493	Optimizing Declarative Graph Queries at Large Scale	2019	SIGMOD
7	12,054	Parallel Traversal of Graphs Stored in RDBMSs	2020	CIDR
8	3,801	All-in-One: Graph Processing in RDBMSs Revisited	2017	SIGMOD
9	7,763	Using Domain-Specific Languages For Analytic Graph Databases	2016	VLDB
10	6,718	G-SQL: Fast Query Processing via Graph Exploration	2016	VLDB