LIPIcs.ICDT.2025.36.pdf
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Database Theory in Action: Cypher, GQL, and Regular Path Queries
Authors
Amélie Gheerbrant 
,
Leonid Libkin ,
Liat Peterfreund ,
Alexandra Rogova
-
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Volume:
28th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2025)
Series: Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)
Conference: International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) - License:
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
- Publication Date: 2025-03-21
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Amélie Gheerbrant, Leonid Libkin, Liat Peterfreund, and Alexandra Rogova. Database Theory in Action: Cypher, GQL, and Regular Path Queries. In 28th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 328, pp. 36:1-36:5, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2025.36
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.
Subject Classification
ACM Subject Classification
- Information systems → Graph-based database models
Keywords
- Regular path queries
- Cypher
- GQL
- inexpressibility
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References
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