Graph Traversals for Regular Path Queries

Regular Path Queries (RPQs) are at the core of many recent declarative graph pattern matching languages. They leverage the compactness and expressiveness of regular expressions for matching recursive path structures. Unfortunately, most prior works on RPQs only consider breadth-first search as traversal strategy, neglecting other possible graph traversals like depth-first search or a combination of both. Within this paper, we conduct an analysis of graph traversals for RPQs by introducing a generalized graph traversal frame-work subsuming breadth-first search and depth-first search as extreme cases and thus opening up a new design space for graph traversals algorithms. We outline the underlying principles as well as provide comprehensive experimental evaluation using implementations which yield beneficial results regarding evaluation time and peak memory consumption.