Multi-Hop Query Performance: RDBMS vs Graph Database
Why relational databases struggle with transitive dependencies
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Hops
RDBMS (no index)
RDBMS (indexed)
Graph DB
1
50 ms
8 ms
5 ms
2
800 ms
95 ms
9 ms
3
8,500 ms
1,200 ms
13 ms
4
45,000 ms
12,000 ms
17 ms
5
180,000 ms ⚠ TIMEOUT
65,000 ms ⚠
21 ms
6
N/A (timeout)
N/A (timeout)
25 ms
Data based on benchmarks: 100,000 node dataset, avg fan-out 3 deps/node, PostgreSQL vs Neo4j