Working with Cypher keywords

In this section, we will introduce the Cypher keywords and their syntax. Detailed usage of these keywords will be covered in upcoming sections of the book.

Let us start by using the MATCH and OPTIONAL MATCH keywords.

Using MATCH and OPTIONAL MATCH

The MATCH keyword allows you to specify the graph traversal patterns to find and return the data from Neo4j. It is most often coupled with a WHERE clause to filter out the results, and a RETURN clause to return the results.

• This shows a basic MATCH query that will find all nodes in the database and return them. It will also return all the node properties shown as follows:

  MATCH (n)

  RETURN n

• This query finds all the nodes that have the Movie label and returns the title property of that node. If there are no nodes with the Movie label, it does not return any results:

  MATCH (n:Movie)

  RETURN n.title

• This query finds any node that has the title property, checks whether its value is My Movie, and...