Mastering Cypher

You'll be using Cypher for querying Neo4j, so learning the ins and outs of the language is key to writing quick and efficient queries, as well as analyzing and streamlining queries that aren't performing optimally.

Several of the best resources to learning and mastering Cypher you may have already encountered, linked in phase 1.

You'll first want to be familiar with the Cypher documentation from the Neo4j Developer's Manual.

Cypher documentation

It also helps to have the refcard handy for quick reference.

Cypher refcard

The Neo4j Onboarding Handbook's Cypher section (linked from the handbook's table of contents) contains deeper dive into some of the trickier aspects of Cypher related to performance (notably, cardinality issues, cartesian products, and aggregation), and discusses profiling queries as well as reviewing some of the intricacies of how certain clauses behave.

Neo4j Onboarding Handbook

 

Learn from our Cypher Knowledge Base

In addition to the official documentation and handbook, our engineers also write knowledge base articles to share Cypher best practices, tuning tips, and to spotlight behavior that may not be immediately obvious but is important for optimization and Cypher mastery.

Cypher Knowledge Base Articles

Among these, some of the most important relate to understanding cardinality within Cypher queries, understanding how MERGE works, and how to handle large delete operations without blowing the heap.

Tuning Cypher queries by understanding cardinality

Understanding how MERGE works