There is also this [1] paper claiming that

> [...] solutions using relational database technology [...] can offer performance superior to that of the dedicated graph databases.

[1] https://event.cwi.nl/grades2013/07-welc.pdf

Note that this is an old paper. They are using Neo4j 1.8.2 for this (and the community version at that), which was released in February of 2013.

Neo4j is at 3.5.9 currently, with 4.0 on the horizon, so there have been 2 major releases, nearly 3, since the paper, and dozens of minor releases and patch releases.

I'm sure Oracle has been making improvements as well (all of the authors are from Oracle), so in any case the paper itself is too outdated to be useful.

The benchmark [1] that Neo4j uses in its advertising [2] is from 2014, so not much newer either.

[1]: https://github.com/opencredo/neo4j-in-action

[2]: https://neo4j.com/business-edge/connected-data-cripples-rela...