Indexes and Constraints

Indexes and constraints are essential for performance and data integrity in Neo4j. Indexes speed up queries by avoiding full graph scans, while constraints enforce rules about your data.

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Why Indexes Matter

Without indexes, Neo4j must scan every node with a given label to find matches:

// Without an index, this scans ALL Person nodes
MATCH (p:Person {email: "alice@example.com"})
RETURN p

With an index on :Person(email), Neo4j goes directly to the matching node.

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Types of Indexes

Index Type	Purpose	Example
Range index	General-purpose lookups, ranges, sorting	Equality, >, <, STARTS WITH
Text index	Full-text string matching	CONTAINS, ENDS WITH
Point index	Geospatial queries	Distance and bounding-box queries
Composite index	Multi-property lookups	Queries filtering on multiple properties
Full-text index	Advanced text search with scoring	Fuzzy matching, relevance ranking
Lookup index	Internal label/type lookups	Automatic — do not create manually

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Creating Indexes

Range index (most common)

// Index on a single property
CREATE INDEX person_email FOR (p:Person) ON (p.email)