GQL: The ISO Standard for Graphs Has Arrived
Last week, the database world reached a significant milestone. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published GQL, a new database language standard designed for property graphs. GQL, which stands for Graph Query Language, is the first new ISO database language since the introduction of SQL in 1987. This milestone has been eagerly anticipated by the graph community for many years, with many companies, including Neo4j and Amazon, actively advocating and contributing to its development.
We’ve often quipped that there are far more graph problems than customers who realize that their problem is best handled as a graph. As we enter into the world of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there is an even greater explosion of applications where graphs are critical for getting accurate, reliable, and explainable results quickly, like GraphRAG. With GQL as a standard, practitioners and buyers alike will be able to use graph technologies with even greater confidence.
The question you are probably asking is: What does this mean for my skills and code, and what does it mean for Cypher? We’re here with some good news: all of you who use Cypher now have a well-paved onramp to GQL. Because the two languages have been on a natural and deliberate convergence course, your best path to GQL is to simply keep using Cypher as it evolves. You also have our commitment that we will continue supporting Cypher for many years. In other words, you can put away your forklift!
