Cypher Query Language
Cypher is a declarative graph query language specifically designed for querying graph databases, most notably Neo4j. It uses an intuitive ASCII-art syntax to represent patterns in the graph, making it easy to express complex graph traversals and relationships. Cypher allows developers to create, read, update, and delete nodes and relationships in a graph database with a human-readable syntax.
Developers should learn Cypher when working with graph databases like Neo4j to efficiently handle connected data, such as social networks, recommendation engines, fraud detection systems, or knowledge graphs. It is particularly useful for scenarios requiring complex relationship queries, pathfinding, or pattern matching that would be cumbersome in SQL. Cypher's expressive syntax simplifies writing queries that involve multiple hops through relationships, making it ideal for applications where data relationships are as important as the data itself.