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For anyone who is just passing by, the article attempts to verify some claims from recent VLDB and SIGMOD papers that claim decent* performance on graph algorithms in RDBMs. It's worth reading not only for the technical merits of the discussion, but also because the style of the article is ...feisty.

*for a given definition of decent.

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There is one fundamental step you should always take when reading systems papers with benchmarks: Always look for what the authors are trying to hide.

It's (a) always there, and (b) always hilarious. From operating systems comparisons that need "we didn't actually slow down the processor physically" comparisons to look good to these "we look great, compared to that guy over there licking the floor."

money quote:

>None of them present any evidence that they are any better than a single-threaded implementation on any problem at any scale. So, if nothing else the published papers are not yet right. But I suspect they are mostly wrong.

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