Abstract Leapfrog Triejoin (LTJ) is arguably the most practical and popular worst-case-optimal (wco) algorithm for solving basic graph patterns in graph databases. Its main drawback is that it needs the database triples (subject, predicate, object) represented as paths in a trie, for each of the six orders of subject, predicate, and object. The resulting blowup in space makes most systems disregard LTJ or implement it only partially, which makes their corresponding algorithms non-wco. In this paper we show that, by using compact data structures, it is possible to build an index that at the same time matches the query time performance of the fastest classic wco index, and uses a fraction of the space of non-wco indices (which are much slower). Concretely, we make use of compact tree representations to store functional tries using one bit per trie edge, instead of one pointer, and further reduce the space by storing partial tries. Our most compact variant uses 5–6 times less space than classic wco implementations and 2–3 times less than classic non-wco systems. At solving queries, it is on par with the fastest classic wco system, and 30–40 times faster than non-wco systems. We further incorporate improved query resolution strategies into CompactLTJ variants, which makes it considerably faster than classic wco systems as well, on queries that do not output too many results. Finally, we show how CompactLTJ can incorporate dynamism without altering its performance, even under very demanding update regimes. We leave a public fully-functional implementation of CompactLTJ that can be directly used by practitioners.

Modern graph database query languages such as GQL, SQL/PGQ, and their academic predecessor G-Core promote paths to first-class citizens in the sense that their pattern matching facility can return paths , as opposed to only nodes and edges. This is challenging for database engines, since graphs can have a large number of paths between a given node pair, which can cause huge intermediate results in query evaluation. We introduce the concept of path multiset representations (PMRs) , which can represent multisets of paths exponentially succinctly and therefore bring significant advantages for representing intermediate results. We give a detailed theoretical analysis that shows that they are especially well-suited for representing results of regular path queries and extensions thereof involving counting, random sampling, and unions. Our experiments show that they drastically improve scalability for regular path query evaluation, with speedups of several orders of magnitude.

In this paper, we experimentally compare the efficiency of various database engines for the purposes of querying the Wikidata knowledge-base, which can be conceptualised as a directed edge-labelled graph where edges can be annotated with meta-information called qualifiers. We take two popular SPARQL databases (Virtuoso, Blazegraph), a popular relational database (PostgreSQL), and a popular graph database (Neo4J) for comparison and discuss various options as to how Wikidata can be represented in the models of each engine. We design a set of experiments to test the relative query performance of these representations in the context of their respective engines. We first execute a large set of atomic lookups to establish a baseline performance for each test setting, and subsequently perform experiments on instances of more complex graph patterns based on real-world examples. We conclude with a summary of the strengths and limitations of the engines observed. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.