Trying to see if querying by property value will be faster that relationship value

Neo4j Graph Platform Cypher
1

Hello,

I'm trying to see which cypher query will be faster.
For a case where I have several user nodes and I want to filter for users of a particular gender.

Will it be better/faster to have "gender" as a separate node and have different values as relationship-properties or to have the gender property on the "user" node.

2

Loading properties is expensive, traversing is cheap. The faster option will be the relationship

3

Thank you very much.

4

One trick a lot of people don't know about, is that Nodes can have multiple Labels.

So, you can do:

CREATE(p:Person:Male {name:"Adam"});
CREATE(p:Person:Female {name:"Eve"})

If you want to match for all Women:

MATCH(women:Female) WHERE ....

The performance advantage of this, is all nodes with the label Female (or Male) is a set, so accessing all the Female nodes is very quick.