On 09/19/08/09/08 23:12 +0200, Orri Erling wrote:
Has has there been any analysis on whether there is a *fundamental*
reason for such performance difference? Or is it simply a question of
"maturity"; in other words, relational db technology has been around for
a very long time and is very mature, whereas RDF implementations are
still quite recent, so this gap will surely narrow ...?
This is a very complex subject. I will offer some analysis below, but
this I fear will only raise further questions. This is not the end of the
road, far from it.
As far as I understand, another issue is relevant: this benchmark is
somewhat unfair as the relational stores have one advantage compared to the
native triple stores: the relational data structure is fixed (Products,
Producers, Reviews, etc with given columns), while the triple
representation is generic (arbitrary s,p,o).
One can question whether such flexibility is relevant in practice, and if
so, one may try to extract such structured patterns from data on-the-fly.
Still, it's important to note that we're comparing somewhat different
things here between the relational and the triple representation of the
benchmark.
-eyal
PS: the benchmark is great, really, possible improvements notwithstanding.