Techniques herein are for navigation data structures for graph traversal. In an embodiment, navigation data structures that a computer stores include: a source vertex array of vertices; a neighbor array of dense identifiers of target vertices terminating edges; a bidirectional map associating, for each vertex, a sparse identifier of the vertex with a dense identifier of the vertex; and a vertex array containing, when a dense identifier of a source vertex is used as an offset, a pair of offsets defining an offset range, for use with the neighbor array. The source vertex array, using the dense identifier of a particular vertex as an offset, contains an offset, into a neighbor array, of a target vertex terminating an edge originating at the particular vertex. The neighbor array contiguously stores dense identifiers of target vertices terminating edges originating from a same source vertex.