The Neo4j Manual v3.1.0-SNAPSHOT8.4. Uniqueness

While pattern matching, Neo4j makes sure to not include matches where the same graph relationship is found multiple times in a single pattern. In most use cases, this is a sensible thing to do.

Example: looking for a user’s friends of friends should not return said user.

Let’s create a few nodes and relationships:

CREATE (adam:User { name: 'Adam' }),(pernilla:User { name: 'Pernilla' }),(david:User { name: 'David'
  }),
  (adam)-[:FRIEND]->(pernilla),(pernilla)-[:FRIEND]->(david)

Which gives us the following graph:

Now let’s look for friends of friends of Adam:

MATCH (user:User { name: 'Adam' })-[r1:FRIEND]-()-[r2:FRIEND]-(friend_of_a_friend)
RETURN friend_of_a_friend.name AS fofName

In this query, Cypher makes sure to not return matches where the pattern relationships r1 and r2 point to the same graph relationship.

This is however not always desired. If the query should return the user, it is possible to spread the matching over multiple MATCH clauses, like so:

MATCH (user:User { name: 'Adam' })-[r1:FRIEND]-(friend)
MATCH (friend)-[r2:FRIEND]-(friend_of_a_friend)
RETURN friend_of_a_friend.name AS fofName

Note that while the following query looks similar to the previous one, it is actually equivalent to the one before.

MATCH (user:User { name: 'Adam' })-[r1:FRIEND]-(friend),(friend)-[r2:FRIEND]-(friend_of_a_friend)
RETURN friend_of_a_friend.name AS fofName

Here, the MATCH clause has a single pattern with two paths, while the previous query has two distinct patterns.