What are specific triplestore strengths and weaknesses?

What triplestore are you using and what are its strengths and weaknesses?

How well does it scale? Is it easy to set up? Does it have good documentation?

Please only put one triplestore per answer if a triplestore is already mentioned provide additional information in comments.

If you look for a comparison of query performance of different open source triple stores, take a look at the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark

Currently, the benchmark offers results for the following triple stores/RDF backends:

I've only use 4store. http://4store.org/

  • It wasn't too hard to get installed. I needed a whole heap of libraries, but they were only an apt-get away.
  • It's Open Source
  • Command line tools
  • Developed by a commercial company (Garlik) rather than hobbyists or academics (not sure if that's a pro or con)

(for the record, the 4store developers are old friends of mine)

I've been using the free version of AllegroGraph. Happy so far.

You might find this paper useful: "Comparison of Triple Stores" http://www.bioontology.org/wiki/images/6/6a/Triple_Stores.pdf

Also, check out the Tools page of the SemanticWeb wiki: http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Tools

Open Link Virtuoso Triple Store is another triple store. It can RDFize any XML or XHTML content. Easy to install on Linux. Windows installation is tougher. I actuallay started using it very recently. Am able to store my Triples, do SPARQL queries on those. Will have to further explore its other potentials. chk out here http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/

If you use Java, you can use Jena, which offers two storage backends.

First, there is SDB, which is based on a backing RDBMS like MySQL, Postgres, etc. The second alternative is TDB, which is a native, disk-based storage system (although not 1.x yet).

I've worked with RDB, the predecessor of SDB, and I've tested SDB, too. With the provided documentation, they are easy to use, and if there are any questions, there is a quite active community at the jena-dev group.

If you don't want to access the stores programmatical, the can also be used as backing storage for the Joseki SPARQL server, to offer a SPARQL endpoint.

Using Talis platform, have tried 4store and looked at a few others.

Talis Platform Pros: management is easy as its SaaS, no commitments to the platform, free developer account, good docs & community

Cons: everything goes via http maybe? you don't control every aspect of how things work

I'm using rdflib + mysql as a backend storage. It's not particularly fast, but it's easy to setup. I plan to migrate after proper benchmarking and profiling.

For PHP environments and small-sized applications (maybe up to 1MT) I can definitely advise to use ARC2. I have used it in several applications (such as in corrib) and am very happy with it.