My personal opinion: the BSBM serves a limited purpose for people
evaluating triple stores, but strikes me as very SQL-ey in style: the
data are the opposite of sparse, and it's not a network. Relational
databases are a much, much better fit for this problem, and thus it's
not very interesting. It's a little benchmarking how well an Excel
spreadsheet can do pixel animation: sure, you can do it, but there
are
other tools which are both mature and more suitable, so why bother?
Wasn't the original point of BSBM to compare RDF stores with RDF-to-
RDB and native SQL for a common application? If so, the fact the
RDF forms match SQL-style is necessary.
That might be the case, but the simple fact that it exists means that
people use it as a broad benchmark for query performance. Even triple
store implementations that don't do RDB mapping are expected to
compete. It's certainly not phrased as "ignore this benchmark unless
X, Y, Z".
Even so, it's benchmarking something that's (broadly speaking) only
interesting to implementors of such triple stores. Users don't (or
shouldn't) care how well their graph store can emulate a traditional
SQL DB.
