Experimental Evaluation of Graph Databases: JanusGraph, Nebula Graph, Neo4j, and TigerGraph

Abstract

NoSQL databases were created with the primary goal of addressing the shortcomings in the efficiency of relational databases, and can be of four types: document, column, key-value, and graph databases. Graph databases can store data and relationships efficiently, and have a flexible and easy-to-understand data schema. In this paper, we perform an experimental evaluation of the four most popular graph databases: JanusGraph, Nebula Graph, Neo4j, and TigerGraph. Database performance is evaluated using the Linked Data Benchmark Council’s Social Network Benchmark (LDBC SNB). In the experiments, we analyze the execution time of the queries, the loading time of the nodes and the RAM and CPU usage for each database. In our analysis, Neo4j was the graph database with the best performance across all metrics.