Querying a graph database using the Java API can be very tedious; you would need to visit the whole graph and skip nodes that don't match what you are searching for. Any changes to the query will result in rethinking the code, changing it, and building it all over again. Why? The reason is that we are using an imperative language to do pattern matching, and traditional imperative languages don't work well in this task. Cypher is the declarative query language used to query a Neo4j database. Declarative means that it focuses on the aspects of the result rather than on methods or ways to get the result so that it is human-readable and expressive.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: