Transforming Product Catalogue Relational into Graph Database: a Performance Comparison

Due to the continuous expansion of telecom operators (TOs) services and subscriber’s base, a number of objects in TO product catalogue (PC) traditionally developed employing some relational database (RD) rapidly increase. This can result in degraded PC database performance in terms of reduced object visibility or slow query response time, which mandates a search for new types of databases that can cope with such challenges. A possible solution to these challenges is the transformation of RD into some graph database (GD), with visualisation and organisation capabilities that can cope with the increasing complexity of PC RDs. Hence, in this paper, a novel implementation concerning the transformation of a set of PC data and functions of the TO RD into ArangoDB GD is proposed. The proposed approach allows the upgrading of PC RD into a higher presentation layer through the implementation of the GD, which enables advanced data analysis and visualization. The developed solution shows that GD with appropriately structured queries, data and links between them, improves the visibility and simplifies the entire search process. Obtained results show that GD outperforms RD in terms of search query response time for different functions executed on an equal amount of database objects.