Neo4j date type as label

Question

I want to create relationships with label type date. Something like this

create (n:Person{name:"Chris"})-[:date("2012-12-02")]->(m:Christos{name:"Nick"}) return n,m

I don't want the date as a property to avoid getting in the disc space and I want to avoid setting the date as a string because it is very slow to compare the string (or transform it to a date).

What is the "fastest" way to set the dates and use them? The relationship is "knows since" the date I plug in.

Is it possible to somehow have dates as relationship types?

Answer 1

Type of a relationship and Labels of a node is only of type String. We cannot values of any other datatype. If you want the lookups to be faster, you can store the date value as a property in the relationship and create an index on that property. Like this:

create (n:Person{name:"Chris"})-[:KNOWS_SINCE{since:date("2012-12-02")}]->(m:Christos{name:"Nick"}) return n,m

CREATE INDEX rel_1 FOR ()-[r:KNOWS_SINCE]-() ON (r.since)