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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

We made a health backend partly using Cypher and the only thing I found was the simple queries looked amazing, but as soon as you need to join non-linearly it started looking a lot like SQL again. And when you're using an ORM it stops mattering. And when you need migrations it gets painful!

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    > but as soon as you need to join non-linearly

At least in our use case, even with some very gnarly 20+ line Cypher queries, it never got to the point where it felt like SQL and certainly, those same queries would be even gnarlier as nested sub-selects, CTEs, or recursive selects, IMO.

Perhaps a characteristic of our model (a taxonomy of Region, Country, Sponsor, Program, Trial, Site, Staff for global clinical trials and documents required by Region/Country/Program/Trial).

Cypher works really well with a well defined taxonomy.

"you need to join non-linearly "

What does this mean?

presumably it has a semantic model of sorts, defining intrinsic relationships between entities (parent-child, composed-of, sibling-of, and so on)

A bit similar how certain joins in SQL can be very straightforward with the "USING" clause, or when it can rely on extra information such as analytic views to derive materialized views (vendor specific)

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