Pattern matching of core GQL, the new ISO standard for querying property graphs, cannot check whether edge values are increasing along a path, as established in recent work. We present a constructive translation that overcomes this limitation by compiling the increasing-edges condition into the input graph. Remarkably, the benefit of this construction goes beyond restoring expressiveness. In our proof-of-concept implementation in Neo4j’s Cypher, where such path constraints are expressible but costly, our compiled version runs faster and avoids timeouts. This illustrates how a theoretically motivated translation can not only close an expressiveness gap but also bring practical performance gains.

SQL/PGQ is the emerging ISO standard for querying property graphs defined as views over relational data. We formalize its expressive power across three fragments: the read-only core, the read-write extension, and an extended variant with richer view definitions. Our results show that graph creation plays a central role in determining the expressiveness. The read-only fragment is strictly weaker than the read-write fragment, and the latter is still below the complexity class NL. Extending view definitions with arbitrary arity identifiers closes this gap: the extended fragment captures exactly NL. This yields a strict hierarchy of SQL/PGQ fragments, whose union covers all NL queries. On ordered structures the hierarchy collapses: once arity-2 identifiers are allowed, higher arities add no power, mirroring the classical transitive-closure collapse and underscoring the central role of view construction in property graph querying.