I was recently working on one of our developer guides (the CSV import guide) and came across some Cypher I needed to fine-tune in the CASE statement on that page. I had some trouble finding the correct syntax, so I reached out to some Cypher experts to get some help. As it turns out, I was looking at the Cypher CASE statement the wrong way and misunderstood its structure and design.

Why is it that some query syntax seems to run faster than another when there is very little difference between the statements? Sometimes, queries will invoke what is called the eager operator in order to maintain consistent operations and avoid conflicting data changes. It still leaves the question, though, of what does this eager operation do differently and why would it be important enough to specifically avoid in certain situations?