Pattern Matching in Neo4j - Neo4j Essentials - page 90

Working with the START clause
START is used in cases where we have multiple starting points and you need to specifically
provide a starting point for evaluating your pattern. Starting points are introduced by legacy
index lookups or by the ID. However, trying to use a legacy index that doesn't exist will
generate an exception.
START is only used when we are dealing with legacy indexes (refer to the next section for
more information on legacy indexes), otherwise Cypher is intelligent enough to find out the
starting point from your pattern by looking at nodes or labels and its predicates.
Starting Neo4j 2.0 START is not recommended and is only used for backward compatibil-
ity with the prior versions of Neo4j. It is advised to not use START for all versions of
Neo4j 2.0+.
Let's consider an example where we need to get details of a node with ID 10 . Your query
would be:
start n=node(10) return n;
The results of the preceding query may vary from database to database as the IDs are in-
ternal to Neo4j and are re-used whenever a node or relationship is deleted.