Abstract
Cypher has so far been the most commonly used query language for property graphs, and served as the foundation of the recently standardized graph query language GQL. In designing the features of GQL, the standards committee addressed the perceived limitations of Cypher. One such limitation is the inability of Cypher, as originally designed, to express all regular path queries (RPQs). Despite this claim having been stated many times as a folklore result, we could not find any proof of it. In this note we formalize the core of Cypher’s pattern matching and formally prove that indeed it falls short of all RPQs, justifying the inclusion of new pattern matching features in GQL.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | 28th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2025 |
| Editors | Sudeepa Roy, Ahmet Kara |
| Publisher | Schloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9783959773645 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 21 Mar 2025 |
| Event | 28th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2025 - Barcelona, Spain Duration: 25 Mar 2025 → 28 Mar 2025 |
Publication series
| Name | Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs |
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| Volume | 328 |
| ISSN (Print) | 1868-8969 |
Conference
| Conference | 28th International Conference on Database Theory, ICDT 2025 |
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| Country/Territory | Spain |
| City | Barcelona |
| Period | 25/03/25 → 28/03/25 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Amélie Gheerbrant, Leonid Libkin, Liat Peterfreund, and Alexandra Rogova.
Keywords
- Cypher
- GQL
- inexpressibility
- Regular path queries