Thinking in Graphs: A Cypher Crash Course for SQL Engineers | by Aayush Ostwal | Jun, 2026

I've written SQL for over a decade. Joins, subqueries, recursive CTEs – the whole deal. Then I tried a graph database (Neo4j). And my relational muscle memory kept getting in the way. I kept trying to "map foreign keys" instead of just… traversing edges. So I built myself a side‑by‑side cheat sheet: SQL → Cypher for everything from basic SELECTs to variable‑length paths that would require recursive CTEs in PG/SQL Server. Turns out, queries like "users who bought this also bought…" go from 30 lines of self‑j