Database Theory in Action: Cypher, GQL, and Regular Path Queries

Gheerbrant, Amélie; Libkin, Leonid; Peterfreund, Liat; Rogova, Alexandra

doi: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.

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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

Author Details

Amélie Gheerbrant

Université Paris Cité, CNRS, IRIF, France

Leonid Libkin

RelationalAI and IRIF, CNRS, Paris, France
University of Edinburgh, UK

Liat Peterfreund

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Alexandra Rogova

Université Paris Cité, CNRS, IRIF, France

Funding

We acknowledge support from: VeriGraph project, ANR-21-CE48-0015 (L. Libkin); Israel Science Foundation 2355/24 (L. Peterfreund); NCN grant 2018/30/E/ST6/00042 (A. Rogova).

References

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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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