Question

I’m trying to find 10 posts that were not LIKED by user “mike” using cypher. Will putting a where clause with a NOT relationship be efficient than matching with an optional relationship then checking if that relationship is null in the where clause? Specifically I want to make sure it won’t do the equivalent of a full table scan and make sure that this is a scalable query.

Here’s what I’m using

START user=node:node_auto_index(uname:"mike"), 
  posts=node:node_auto_index("postId:*") 
  WHERE not (user-[:LIKES]->posts) 
  RETURN posts SKIP 20 LIMIT 10;

Or can I do something where I filter on a MATCH optional relationship

START user=node:node_auto_index(uname="mike"),
  posts=node:node_auto_index("postId:*")
  MATCH user-[r?:LIKES]->posts  
  WHERE r IS NULL
  RETURN posts SKIP 100 LIMIT 10;

Some quick tests on the console seem to show faster performance in the 2nd approach. Am I right to assume the 2nd query is faster? And, if so why?

Answer 1

i think in the first query the engine runs through all postID nodes and manually checks the condition of not (user-[:LIKES]->posts) for each post ID
whereas in the second example (assuming you use at least v1.9.02) the engine picks up only the post nodes, which actually aren’t connected to the user. this is just optimalization where the engine does not go through all postIDs nodes.

if possible, always use the MATCH clause in your queries instead of WHERE, and try to omit the asterix in the declaration START n=node:index('name:*')