A Comparison between a Relational Database and a Graph Database in the context of a Personalized Cancer Treatment Application

Abstract

This paper presents a performance comparison between a relational database (implemented in MySQL) and a graph database (implemented in Neo4j). Unlike traditional benchmarks, this comparison is made in the context of a real health application which was developed in Costa Rica. The comparison encompassed twelve queries and three data size configurations.The results of the comparison indicate that MySQL performs better than Neo4j in most cases, but has a poor performance when data size is large and the queries have multiple join operations.