The Berlin SPARQL Benchmark

The SPARQL Query Language for RDF and the SPARQL Protocol for RDF are implemented by a growing number of storage systems and are used within enterprise and open Web settings. As SPARQL is taken up by the community, there is a growing need for benchmarks to compare the performance of storage systems that expose SPARQL end-points via the SPARQL protocol. Such systems include native RDF stores as well as systems that rewrite SPARQL queries to SQL queries against non-RDF relational databases. This article introduces the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark (BSBM) for comparing the performance of native RDF stores with the performance of SPARQL-to-SQL rewriters across architectures. The benchmark is built around an e-commerce use case in which a set of products is offered by different vendors and consumers have posted reviews about products. The benchmark query mix emulates the search and navigation pattern of a consumer looking for a product. The article discusses the design of the BSBM benchmark and presents the results of a benchmark experiment comparing the performance of four popular RDF stores (Sesame, Virtuoso, Jena TDB, and Jena SDB) with the performance of two SPARQL-to-SQL rewriters (D2R Server and Virtuoso RDF Views) as well as the performance of two relational database management systems (MySQL and Virtuoso RDBMS). [Article copies are available for purchase from InfoSci-on-Demand.com]