Do SPARQL queries perform well against small datasets? Large datasets?
The performance of a SPARQL query against any particular dataset depends not only upon the size of the dataset but also on the nature of the dataset’s storage (a relational store, a native triple store, LDAP, etc.), the complexity of the query itself, optimizations in use by the SPARQL engine, the distribution of the data, and other environmental factors. To date, little work has been done in analyzing SPARQL query performance in particular, and the field of SPARQL query optimization is relatively inchoate. Some analysis has been done on the topic of RDF stores which can handle large datasets. (A large dataset in this context is usually considered one on the order of tens or hundreds of millions of triples). The W3C ESW wiki contains information on a variety of RDF stores which can scale to large numbers of triples, but does not speak specifically to the performance of SPARQL queries against these stores.
