Delete a Relationship using Cypher in Neo4j - neo4j tutorial - graph database

You can delete relationships in the same way as deleting nodes - by matching the relationship/s you want to delete.
You can delete one or many relationships in one go. You can even delete all relationships in the database.
First, as a memory refresher, here are the relationships that we created earlier:

Let's delete the relationship of type RELEASED.
There are several ways we could go about this. Let's look at three.
The following statement is quite broad - it will delete all relationships of type RELEASED:

MATCH ()-[r:RELEASED]-() 

DELETE r

MATCH (:Artist)-[r:RELEASED]-(:Album) 

DELETE r

The above statement will match all Artist nodes that have a relationship type of RELEASED with an Album node.
You could be even more specific and do something like this:

MATCH (:Artist {Name: "Strapping Young Lad"})-[r:RELEASED]-(:Album 

{Name: "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing"}) 

DELETE r

Any of those statements will result in the RELEASED relationship being deleted. The graph will look like this:

Deleting Nodes with Relationships Attached

MATCH (a:Artist {Name: "Strapping Young Lad"}) DELETE a

This is because that node has a relationship connected.
One option is to delete all relationships, then delete the node.
Another option is to use the DETACH DELETE clause. The DETACH DELETE clause lets you delete a node and all relationships connected to it.
So we can change the above statement to this:

MATCH (a:Artist {Name: "Strapping Young Lad"}) DETACH DELETE a

You can take the DETACH DELETE a step further and delete the whole database.
Simply remove any filtering criteria and it will delete all nodes and all relationships.
Go ahead and execute the following statement:

MATCH (n) DETACH DELETE n