Neo4j nodes or relationship supports ttl?

Question

I am learning neo4j , i want to know that is there any way that i can create a relationship or a node that will be delete automatically after a certain period of time.

Answer 1

There's nothing that I know of like this. Neo4j is just a database like *SQL or MongoDB (though let me know if they can do something like this).

The best suggestion that I would have is to put a delete_after property (or something similar) on the relationships and then have a job which queries on a regular basis to clean them up. Note that you can't query for relationships directly (that is, nodes always need to be involved in your query) so depending on how big your database is, you may need to think through what sort of index you need. I'm a bit vague here because I don't know what your domain model would look like.

Answer 2

As pointed out by @Scott in the comments, you can specify a TTL on nodes by using APOC as shown here. Append the following to your neo4j.conf:

apoc.ttl.enabled=true

Then you can either set the appropriate label and property yourself:

SET n:TTL
SET n.ttl = timestamp() + 3600

or utilize one of the following procedures:

// Expires in
CALL apoc.date.expire.in(node,time,'time-unit')

// Expires at
CALL apoc.date.expire(node,time,'time-unit')

Answer 3

If you are like me and stumble to this article, this has recently been updated. Ref: https://neo4j.com/labs/apoc/4.3/overview/apoc.ttl/apoc.ttl.expireIn/

    Match(person:person {id: 100})
    CALL apoc.ttl.expireIn(person, 10,'s')
    Return person;