As you would do with SQL, you can check the Cypher query planner to understand what happens under the hood and how to improve your query. Two options are possible:
- EXPLAIN: If you do not want the query to be run, EXPLAIN won't make any changes to your graph.
- PROFILE: This will actually run the query and alter your graph, together with measuring performance.
In the rest of this chapter, we will use a dataset released by Facebook in 2012 for a recruiting competition hosted by Kaggle. The dataset can be downloaded here: https://www.kaggle.com/c/FacebookRecruiting/data. I have only used the training sample, containing a list of connections between anonymized people. It contains 1,867,425 nodes and 9,437,519 edges.
We already talked about one of the operations that can be identified in the query planner: Eager operations, which we need to avoid as much as possible since they really hurt performance. Let's see some more operators and how to tune our queries...
