Cypher

Designed to be a human readable query language, Cypher is suitable for developers and operations professionals alike. The guiding principle behind Cypher is to make simple things easy and complex things possible. Cypher combines English prose and intuitive iconography, making queries more self-explanatory.

Cypher is declarative, which means it lets users express what data to retrieve, letting the engine underneath take care of seamlessly retrieving it. In contrast, imperative or scripting languages, including early-generation graph languages, require query writers to have a deep technical understanding of physical implementation details. Cypher eliminates this burden.

The expressive querying of Cypher is inspired by a number of different approaches and established practices. Most of the keywords, such as WHERE and ORDER BY , are inspired by SQL, while pattern matching borrows from SPARQL. In addition, some of the collection semantics have been borrowed from languages such as Haskell and Python.

The openCypher project makes it possible for any developer or technology provider to use Cypher and incorporate graph processing capabilities within that product or application.

Easy-to-learn and yet extremely powerful, Cypher is the industry’s most successful and widely adopted graph query language. With the advent of openCypher, the language promises to be just as instrumental in the growth of graph processing and analysis as SQL was instrumental in accelerating the adoption of RDBMS.