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Cypher allows creation, reading, updating and deleting of graph elements, and is a language that can therefore be used for analytics engines and transactional databases.
====The central role of visual path patterns====
Cypher uses compact fixed- and variable-length patterns which combine visual representations of node and relationship (edge) topologies, with label existence and property value predicates. (These patterns are usually referred to as "ASCII Art" patterns, and arose originally as a way of commenting programs which used a lower-level graph API.[<ref name="GQLs history"/>) By matching such a pattern against graph data elements, a query can extract references to nodes, relationships and paths of interest. Those references are emitted as a "binding table" where column names are bound to a multiset of graph elements. The name of a column becomes the name of a "binding variable", whose value is a specific graph element reference for each row of the table.
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