A Join Operator for Property Graphs

In the graph database literature the term "join" does not refer to an operator combining two graphs, but involves path traversal queries over a single graph. Current languages express binary joins through the combination of path traversal queries with graph creation operations. Such solution proves to be not efficient. In this paper we introduce a binary graph join operator and a corresponding algorithm outperforming the solution proposed by query languages for either graphs (Cypher, SPARQL) and relational databases (SQL). This is achieved by using a specific graph data structure in secondary memory showing better performance than state of the art graph libraries (Boost Graph Library, SNAP) and database systems (Sparksee)