Cypher Clauses Reference

Consumer View

Clauses are the pipeline-building pieces of Cypher. They define how rows are created, narrowed, transformed, ordered, mutated, or handed to procedures.

If functions answer “how do I transform this value?”, clauses answer:

• where do the rows come from
• how do they get filtered
• how do they get reshaped
• when do writes happen
• where do procedures or schema changes fit

Main Clause Families

• Reading
• Ordering And Paging
• Writing
• Procedural
• Time
• Statement Forms
• Schema And Admin
• Pattern Features

How To Read The Clause Docs

The most important thing is not memorizing keywords in isolation. It is understanding where each clause sits in the execution flow.

Examples:

• MATCH, OPTIONAL MATCH, WHERE, WITH, and RETURN define the normal row pipeline
• ASOF, TIME, VALID, LATEST, WINDOW, and ALIGN extend that pipeline with temporal semantics
• CALL and CALL { ... } bring procedures and subqueries back into the same row flow
• CREATE, MERGE, SET, REMOVE, DELETE, and FOREACH express writes
• statement forms such as scripts, FROM PREVIOUS, UNION, EXPLAIN, and PROFILE control how whole statements are combined, inspected, or staged
• schema/admin clauses define indexes, constraints, graph typing, and time-series declarations