Updating Graph Databases with Cypher
Summary: Reviews Cypher's graph updates, noting relational-analogue features and those that intertwine with queries. Pinpoints atomicity violations and nondeterminism, then describes industry-academia effort that redesigned a streamlined Cypher update set. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Alastair Green (Neo4j)
- 2. Paolo Guagliardo (University of Edinburgh)
- 3. Leonid Libkin (University of Edinburgh)
- 4. Tobias Lindaaker (Neo4j)
- 5. Victor Marsault (ESIEE Paris; Laboratoire d'Informatique Gaspard-Monge; National Centre for Scientific Research; University of Edinburgh; Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée; École des Ponts ParisTech)
- 6. Stefan Plantikow (Neo4j)
- 7. Martin Schuster (Abbott Informatics; University of Edinburgh)
- 8. Petra Selmer (Neo4j)
- 9. Hannes Voigt (Neo4j)
BibTeX Citation
@article{green_vldb19,
title = {{Updating Graph Databases with Cypher}},
author = {Green, Alastair and Guagliardo, Paolo and Libkin, Leonid and Lindaaker, Tobias and Marsault, Victor and Plantikow, Stefan and Schuster, Martin and Selmer, Petra and Voigt, Hannes},
journal = {PVLDB},
series = {{VLDB} '19},
volume = {12},
number = {12},
pages = {2242--2253},
doi = {10.14778/3352063.3352139},
url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3352063.3352139},
year = {2019}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2,861 | PG-Keys: Keys for Property Graphs | 2021 | SIGMOD | 8.0212883e-05 |
| 8,411 | Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data | 2024 | VLDB | 5.4309351e-05 |
| 9,187 | Transforming Property Graphs | 2024 | VLDB | 5.3058708e-05 |
| 10,948 | Shifting Transaction Isolation on Graphs: From Systems to Data | 2025 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 264 | The Ubiquity of Large Graphs and Surprising Challenges of Graph Processing | 2018 | VLDB | 0.00022980015 |
| 547 | Cypher: An Evolving Query Language for Property Graphs | 2018 | SIGMOD | 0.00016731552 |
| 900 | G-CORE: A Core for Future Graph Query Languages | 2018 | SIGMOD | 0.00013337186 |
| 910 | Cosette: An Automated Prover for SQL | 2017 | CIDR | 0.00013285905 |
| 3,925 | A Formal Semantics of SQL Queries, Its Validation, and Applications | 2018 | VLDB | 7.0140857e-05 |
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