Neo4j - Delete a Relationship using Cypher

You can delete relationships in the same way as deleting nodes — by matching the relationship/s you want to delete.

You can delete one or many relationships in one go. You can even delete all relationships in the database.

First, as a memory refresher, here are the relationships that we created earlier:

Let's delete the relationship of type RELEASED.

There are several ways we could go about this. Let's look at three.

The following statement is quite broad — it will delete all relationships of type RELEASED:

You could also be more specific and write something like this:

The above statement will match all Artist nodes that have a relationship type of RELEASED with an Album node.

You could be even more specific and do something like this:

Any of those statements will result in the RELEASED relationship being deleted. The graph will look like this:

Deleting Nodes with Relationships Attached

Nodes can't be deleted if they still have relationships attached to them.

If we try to run the following statement:

We will get the following error:

This is because that node has a relationship connected.

One option is to delete all relationships, then delete the node.

Another option is to use the DETACH DELETE clause. The DETACH DELETE clause lets you delete a node and all relationships connected to it.

So we can change the above statment to this:

Running that statement will result in the following success message:

You can take the DETACH DELETE a step further and delete the whole database.

Simply remove any filtering criteria and it will delete all nodes and all relationships.

Go ahead and execute the following statement:

We no longer have any data in the database... so I guess that's the end of the tutorial :)

If you're interested in learning more about working with Neo4j, check out the official Neo4j documentation.