A Unified Narrative for Query Processing in Graph Databases

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Yue Pang, Lei Zou, M. Tamer Özsu

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 07 Jan 2026ICDE 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: With the advent of graph data, graph databases have garnered significant research interest and efforts in recent years, especially with respect to graph query processing. There have been a vast suite of methods for efficient graph query processing, especially for the core graph query constructs, regular path queries (RPQs) and subgraph matching queries (SMQs). In the meantime, there is an observable divide among these methods as well as confusion between them and their relational counterparts. We thus propose this tutorial to provide a unified narrative for graph query processing, so as to bridge the gap between existent lines of work and offer a comprehensive view of the query processing workflow in graph databases.