Cypher: It doesn’t all start with the START (in Neo4j 2.0!)
From the post:
So, apparently, the Neo Technology guys read one of my last blog posts titled “It all starts with the START” and wanted to make a liar out of me. Actually, I’m quite certain it had nothing at all to do with that–they are just wanting to improve Cypher to make it the best graph query language out there. But yes, the
STARTclause is now optional. “How do I tell Neo4j where to start my traversals”, you might ask. Well, in the long run, you won’t need to anymore. Neo4j will keep index and node/rel statistics and know which index to use, and know which start points to use to make thematchandwherethe most efficient query based on its cost optimization. It’s not quite there yet, so for a while we’ll probably want to make generous use of “index hints”, but I love the direction this is going–feels just like the good old SQL.
While you are looking at Neo4j 2.0, remember the performance benchmarks by René Pickhardt up through Neo4j 1.9:
As of Neo4j 1.7, the core Java API was a full order of magnitude faster than Cypher and up to Neo4j 1.9, the difference was even greater.
Has anyone run the benchmark against Neo4j 2.0?