An Experimental Comparison of RDF Data Management Approaches in a SPARQL Benchmark Scenario

Efficient RDF data management is one of the cornerstones in realizing the Semantic Web vision. In the past, different RDF storage strategies have been proposed, ranging from simple triple stores to more advanced techniques like clustering or vertical partitioning on the predicates. We present an experimental comparison of existing storage strategies on top of the SP2Bench SPARQL performance benchmark suite and put the results into context by comparing them to a purely relational model of the benchmark scenario. We observe that (1) in terms of performance and scalability, a simple triple store built on top of a column-store DBMS is competitive to the vertically partitioned approach when choosing a physical (predicate, subject, object) sort order, (2) in our scenario with real-world queries, none of the approaches scales to documents containing tens of millions of RDF triples, and (3) none of the approaches can compete with a purely relational model. We conclude that future research is necessary to further bring forward RDF data management.