Neo4j golang driver against FalkorDB / CYPHER language support

[davisford]

I have a fairly large code base that currently uses Neo4j. It's written in Go using their native driver which uses the bolt protocol https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-go-driver. FalkorDB claims to have support for bolt (albeit listed as experimental).

I'm trying to explore moving away from Neo4j in favor of FalkorDB, but re-writing all the code to use the FalkorDB driver would be a considerable amount of work. I was hopeful that the driver would just work. Here's what I've tried:

Spin up local docker instance of falkordb, afterwards, I created a graph named test and a user neo4j in the browser

docker run -p 6379:6379 -p 7687:7687 -p 3000:3000 -it -e REDIS_ARGS="--requirepass falkordb" -e FALKORDB_ARGS="BOLT_PORT 7687" --rm falkordb/falkordb:latest

Configure the neo4j driver as such:

neo4j:
  url: 'bolt://localhost:7687'
  username: falkordb
  password:
  database: test
  logLevel: DEBUG
  driver:
    encrypted: false
    maxTransactionRetryTime: 30s
    maxConnectionPoolSize: 100
    maxConnectionLifetime: 1h
    connectionAcquisitionTimeout: 1m
    socketConnectTimeout: 5s
    socketKeepalive: true

Then I tried running our full integration test suite against the db. The first problem I ran into is falkordb cypher doesn't appear to support the conditional | operator in node matching patterns:

https://neo4j.com/docs/cypher-manual/current/patterns/fixed-length-patterns/#node-patterns

Specifically something like this: MATCH (n:(TrainStation&BusStation)|StationGroup)

I hit this error

2025-12-04 12:21:59.707  ERROR  [bolt5 02b2cea1-8c5d-4edd-848c-07abb09a5304@localhost:7687] Neo4jError: SyntaxError (errMsg: Invalid input '|': expected a label, '{', a parameter or ')' line: 1, column: 14, offset: 13 errCtx: MATCH (n:User|Email|Organization|LocationGroup|Location|JobRole|JobPosition|E... errCtxOffset: 13)

Is there a spec sheet or list that identifies the limitations of the cypher spec implementation anywhere?

[davisford]

After digging deeper, I see there is a workaround for this mentioned on here: https://github.com/orgs/FalkorDB/discussions/457 and the | symbol appears to be a neo4j supported pattern, not part of OpenCypher