DETACH DELETE Neo4j 2.3.x/Cypher

Question

What is the behaviour and purpose of the new Cypher operator DETACH DELETE added in Neo4j 2.3.x?

If you are coming here from a search engine to try to find the difference between `detach` and `delete`: `detach` removes the relationships of a node. `delete` deletes a node. You will need to `detach` a node before you `delete` it if it has any relationships. — , Mar 06 '17 at 15:19

score 25 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 25 '16 at 14:56

25

If you want to delete nodes, you need to delete the relationships as well. In previous versions you would need to do:

MATCH (n)
OPTIONAL MATCH (n)-[r]-()
DELETE n, r

Now you can simply say:

MATCH (n)
DETACH DELETE n

edited Jul 25 '16 at 14:56

Robert Di Paolo

answered Oct 15 '15 at 05:32

Brian Underwood

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 17 '16 at 11:16

I could not comment on Brian's answer so here it is:

This command:

MATCH n
DETACH DELETE n

Gives to following error:

WARNING: Parentheses are required to identify nodes in patterns, i.e. (n) (line 1, column 7 (offset: 6))
"MATCH n"
       ^

Thus the correct command is:

MATCH (n)
DETACH DELETE n

2 Answers2