The idea in one paragraph

Your graph holds what you own. Everything else — a CRM contact, a GitHub issue, a paper, a clinical trial — lives in somebody else’s system. Virtual Cypher lets you traverse into it as though it were already in the graph: you write one Cypher query, and the engine fetches the far side on demand, materializes it for the life of the query, and rolls it back. Nothing is mirrored, so nothing goes stale.

The mental model

Think of a virtual label as a view over an external system that materializes only the rows a query touches. The closest analogues:

• A SQL foreign data wrapper / external table — but reached through graph traversal, so the anchor you start from decides which external rows are fetched.
• A LOTUS / Cortex semantic operator — but expressed inside Cypher, so structure (who emailed whom) and meaning (which threads are about X) compose in one query (see §6, vector edges).

You never call Virtual Cypher directly. You declare the pieces and the engine plans and runs the fetch.

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