A discussion on the design of graph database benchmarks

Abstract

Graph Database Management systems (GDBs) are gaining popularity. They are used to analyze huge graph datasets that are naturally appearing in many application areas to model interrelated data. The objective of this paper is to raise a new topic of discussion in the benchmarking community and allow practitioners having a set of basic guidelines for GDB benchmarking. We strongly believe that GDBs will become an important player in the market field of data analysis, and with that, their performance and capabilities will also become important. For this reason, we discuss those aspects that are important from our perspective, i.e. the characteristics of the graphs to be included in the benchmark, the characteristics of the queries that are important in graph analysis applications and the evaluation workbench.