What is faster/better way to model, searching for a node with an indexed property, or having a single ROOT node with lots of ChildOf relationships, each with a relationship property equal to the index property and starting the search from ROOT and traversing the relationships that have the correct relationship property? Assume the key being sought is unique.
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2 Answers
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My understanding is that the current version of Neo4j (2.2.3) uses the built-in indexing features of Neo4j (as of version 2.x) when you declare an index on the label.property combination you wish to use in a predicate. With relationship properties, the indexing does not use the newer indexing scheme. You can only use the old legacy indexing for relationship properties, which is not as fast.
See the note on this page.
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I think this is the wrong way to think about this question; you should model the data in the way that's more natural for the domain.
It's hard to answer which will be faster because you haven't specified things like how many valid values the index would have in it, the total number of nodes, and so on. In any case, if you're trying to express some kind of semantic relationship like ChildOf you're almost certainly better off with the node and relationships. You should consider storing the ID of one node as a property value of another node to be a major anti-pattern to be avoided.
If on the other hand, the property is say, gender of a person, M/F, and you have 1,000,000 people, then you end up with two "index nodes", each with 500,000 relationships, that's not going to be a good idea.
In general, neo4j is set up to traverse relationships fast, so in general you'll be better off exploiting relationships. But there are a lot of exceptions to that which depend on your domain's semantics, and the cardinality of your attribute values, so YMMV.
