Graph Analytics Using Vertica Relational Database

Graph analytics is becoming increasingly popular, with a number of new applications and systems developed in the past few years. In this paper, we study Vertica relational database as a platform for graph analytics. We show that vertexcentric graph analysis can be translated to SQL queries, typically involving table scans and joins, and that modern column-oriented databases are very well suited to running such queries. Furthermore, we show how developers can trade memory footprint for significantly reduced I/O costs in Vertica. We present an experimental evaluation of the Vertica relational database system on a variety of graph analytics, including iterative analysis, a combination of graph and relational analyses, and more complex 1-hop neighborhood graph analytics, showing that it is competitive to two popular vertex-centric graph analytics systems, namely Giraph and GraphLab.