A comparative evaluation of RDBMS and GDBMS for shortest path operations on pedestrian navigation data

Until recently, Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) were the main technology for the implementation of traditional data-intensive storage and retrieval applications. Over time, these systems have become very efficient, except in the case of storing complex data structures that contain many relationships and properties as they require multiple joins of large tables, which significantly reduce their performance. In such cases, where data have a natural representation as a graph (big data, semantic web, social and computer networks, geographical applications), Graph Database Management Systems (GDBMS) are an efficient solution providing better performance and scalability compared to RDBMS. A very common function of GIS applications is to calculate the shortest path on graph datasets that represent transportation networks. The objective of this work is the comparative evaluation of MySQL and Neo4j in shortest path computation over the same graph dataset representing pedestrian routes of the historic center of Thessaloniki city.