Using Cypher to operate on Neo4j

Operations on Neo4j are generally performed using a query language called Cypher. Cypher is a simple, expressive, SQL-like language that allows us to create, read, update, and delete nodes and relationships in Neo4j. To retrieve data from a Neo4j store, we write Cypher queries, which specify which nodes and which relationships to traverse.

Cypher is a declarative graph query language. Each query is built of clauses and each clause pipes/feeds the next clause with data. Cypher is designed to be a humane query language suitable for developers and operations professionals, and hence, elegantly combines simplicity, expressiveness. and efficiency.

Note

There are ways in which you can, and should influence efficiency from a user perspective, particularly by writing queries that utilize and are sympathetic to the graph structure. However, each query is planned, costed, and executed by the query engine that tries to optimize queries. This allows users to focus on better...