SPARQL is a very powerful query language. As it should be suspected, this means there are areas where performance is inherently sacrificed for versatility.

These are some tips to get the best of SPARQL as implemented by Tracker.

Avoid queries with unrestricted predicates

Queries with unrestricted predicates are those like:

SELECT ?p { <a> ?p 42 }

These involve lookups across all possible triples of an object, which roughly translates to a traversal through all tables and columns.

The most pathological case is:

SELECT ?s ?p ?o { ?s ?p ?o }

Which does retrieve every triple existing in the RDF triple store.

Queries with unrestricted predicates are most useful to introspect resources, or the triple store in its entirety. Production code should do this in rare occasions.

Avoid the negated property path

The ! negation operator in property paths negate the match. For example:

SELECT ?s ?o { ?s !nie:url ?o }

This query looks for every other property that is not nie:url. The same reasoning than unrestricted predicates apply, since that specific query is equivalent to:

SELECT ?s ?o {
   ?s ?p ?o .
   FILTER (?p != nie:url)
}

Specify graphs wherever possible

Queries on the union graph, or with unrestricted graphs, for example:

SELECT ?u { ?u a rdfs:Resource }
SELECT ?g ?u { GRAPH ?g { ?u a rdfs:Resource }}

Will traverse across all graphs. Query complexity will increment linearly with the amount of graphs. Production code should rarely need to introspect graphs, and should strive to being aware of the graph(s) involved. The fastest case is accessing one graph.

The graph(s) may be specified through WITH / FROM / FROM NAMED / GRAPH and other SPARQL syntax for graphs. For example:

WITH <http://example.com/Graph> SELECT ?u { ?u a rdfs:Resource }
SELECT ?g ?u FROM NAMED <http://example.com/Graph> { GRAPH ?g { ?u a rdfs:Resource }}

Avoid globs and substring matching

Matching for regexp/glob/substrings defeats any index text fields could have. For example:

SELECT ?u {
  ?u nie:title ?title .
  FILTER (CONTAINS (?title, "banana"))
}

Will traverse all title strings looking for the substring. It is encouraged to use fulltext search for finding matches within strings where possible, for example:

SELECT ?u { ?u fts:match "banana" }

Use TrackerSparqlStatement

Using TrackerSparqlStatement allows to parse and compile a query once, and reuse it many times. Its usage is recommended wherever possible.