cq - cypher queries for database/sql

A database/sql implementation for Cypher. Still in development, but already surprisingly usable.

Thanks to Baron, Mike, and Jason for the ideas/motivation to start on this project. Cypher is close enough to SQL that it seems to fit pretty well in the idiomatic database/sql implementation.

Other Go drivers for Neo4j that support Cypher

• Neoism (a careful/complete REST API implementation)
• GonormCypher (a port of AnormCypher, to get up and running quickly)
• neo4j-go (Jake's experimental Cypher driver)

usage

See the excellent database/sql tutorial from VividCortex, as well as the package documentation for database/sql for an introduction to the idiomatic go database access.

One key thing to mention that's slightly different, at least so far. For now, you can (and should) use parameters, but the placeholders must be numbers in sequence, e.g. {0}, {1}, {2}, and then you must put them in order in the calls to Query/Exec. I hope to overcome this at some point, but I haven't figured out a good way to represent Cypher's named parameters in the parameterized query feature of database/sql.

minimum viable snippet

package main

import (
	"database/sql"
	"log"
	
	_ "github.com/wfreeman/cq"
)

func main() {
	db, err := sql.Open("neo4j-cypher", "http://localhost:7474")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer db.Close()

	stmt, err := db.Prepare(`
		match (n:User)-[:FOLLOWS]->(m:User) 
		where n.screenName = {0} 
		return m.screenName as friend
		limit 10
	`)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer stmt.Close()

	rows, err := stmt.Query("wefreema")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer rows.Close()

	var friend string
	for rows.Next() {
		err := rows.Scan(&friend)
		if err != nil {
			log.Fatal(err)
		}
		log.Println(friend)
	}
}

transactional API

The transactional API using db.Begin() is optimized for sending many queries to the transactional Cypher endpoint, in that it will batch them up and send them in chunks by default. Currently only supports stmt.Exec() within a transaction, will work on supporting stmt.Query() next and queueing up results.

transactional API example

func main() {
	db, err := sql.Open("neo4j-cypher", "http://localhost:7474")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	defer db.Close()

	tx, err := db.Begin()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	
	stmt, err := tx.Prepare("create (:User {screenName:{0}})")	
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
	
	stmt.Exec("wefreema")
	stmt.Exec("JnBrymn")
	stmt.Exec("technige")
	
	err := tx.Commit()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

types subpackage

database/sql out of the box doesn't implement many types to pass in as parameters or Scan() out of rows. Custom Cypher types are implemented in the cq/types subpackage. These custom types allow users of cq to Scan() types out of results, as well as pass types in as parameters.

Go type	Can be query parameter?	cq wrapper, for Scan	CypherType uint8
nil	yes	CypherValue	CypherNull
bool	yes	use go bool	CypherBoolean
string	yes	use go string	CypherString
int	yes	use go int	CypherInt
int64	yes	use go int64	CypherInt64
float64	yes	use go float64	CypherFloat64
time.Time	yes	use go NullTime	NullTime
types.Node	no	Node	CypherNode
types.Relationship	no	Relationship	CypherRelationship
types.CypherValue	yes	CypherValue	CypherValueType
N/A	no	not implemented	CypherPath
[]string	yes	ArrayString	CypherArrayString
[]int	yes	ArrayInt	CypherArrayInt
[]int64	yes	ArrayInt64	CypherArrayInt64
[]float64	yes	ArrayFloat64	CypherArrayFloat64
[]types.CypherValue	yes	ArrayCypherValue	CypherArrayCypherValue
map[string]string	yes	MapStringString	CypherMapStringString
map[string]types.CypherValue	yes	MapStringCypherValue	CypherMapStringCypherValue

transactional API benchmarks

Able to get sustained times of 20k+ cypher statements per second, even with multiple nodes per create... on a 2011 vintage macbook.

(master ✓) wes-macbook:cq go test -bench=".*Transaction.*" -test.benchtime=10s
PASS
BenchmarkTransactional10SimpleCreate	  100000	    150630 ns/op
BenchmarkTransactional100SimpleCreate	  500000	     39202 ns/op
BenchmarkTransactional1000SimpleCreate	 1000000	     27320 ns/op
BenchmarkTransactional10000SimpleCreate	  500000	     28524 ns/op
ok  	github.com/wfreeman/cq	79.973s

license

MIT license. See license file.