Here's a super-basic test using MySQL CTEs w/1.6M nodes and 30M edges that I did a few years ago - https://intertubes.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/benchmarketing-n...
> [...] solutions using relational database technology [...] can offer performance superior to that of the dedicated graph databases.
Neo4j is at 3.5.9 currently, with 4.0 on the horizon, so there have been 2 major releases, nearly 3, since the paper, and dozens of minor releases and patch releases.
I'm sure Oracle has been making improvements as well (all of the authors are from Oracle), so in any case the paper itself is too outdated to be useful.
[1]: https://github.com/opencredo/neo4j-in-action
[2]: https://neo4j.com/business-edge/connected-data-cripples-rela...