Graph or Relational Databases: A Speed Comparison for Process Mining Algorithm

Process-Aware Information System (PAIS) are IT systems that manages, supports business processes and generate large event logs from execution of business processes. An event log is represented as a tuple of the form CaseID, TimeStamp, Activity and Actor. Process Mining is an emerging area of research that deals with the study and analysis of business processes based on event logs. Process Mining aims at analyzing event logs and discover business process models, enhance them or check for conformance with an a priori model. The large volume of event logs generated are stored in databases. Relational databases perform well for certain class of applications. However, there are certain class of applications for which relational databases are not able to scale. A number of NoSQL databases have emerged to encounter the challenges of scalability. Discovering social network from event logs is one of the most challenging and important Process Mining task. Similar-Task and Sub-Contract algorithms are some of the most widely used Organizational Mining techniques. Our objective is to investigate which of the databases (Relational or Graph) perform better for Organizational Mining under Process Mining. An intersection of Process Mining and Graph Databases can be accomplished by modelling these Organizational Mining metrics with graph databases. We implement Similar-Task and Sub-Contract algorithms on relational and NoSQL (graph-oriented) databases using only query language constructs. We conduct empirical analysis on a large real world data set to compare the performance of row-oriented database and NoSQL graph-oriented database. We benchmark performance factors like query execution time, CPU usage and disk/memory space usage for NoSQL graph-oriented database against row-oriented database.