Performance: Creating a relationship in neo4j based on property ID - neo4j

Question

For test purposes i imported data from another datasource into neo4j.
I imported the data only as nodes. Now i want to add the edges based on the imported ID. Every node has 2 fields
id: contains the identification as String
from: contains all connections as a String[]
For performance improvements i also created an index for the propertiy "id" and an index for the property "from"
First i created both properties as String (the from list as comma separated String).
This works, but is really slow:
MATCH (e:Test1),(r:Test2)
WHERE r.from CONTAINS e._id
MERGE (e)-[:HAS]->(r)
is there a better way?
PS: i tried also to store the from field as String[]. than i used the following query
MATCH (e:Test1),(r:Test2)
WHERE e._id IN r.from
MERGE (e)-[:HAS]->(r)
-> Performance is the same

Answer 1

The problem is that you take a combination of all components - the Cartesian product. In both cases. More would be better to split the string by comma to identifiers. For example:
MATCH (T2:Test2)
UNWIND split(T2.from, ",") as id
MATCH (T1:Test1) WHERE T1._id = id
MERGE (T1)-[:HAS]->(T2)
Or, if you keep the identifiers in the array:
MATCH (T2:Test2)
UNWIND T2.from as id
MATCH (T1:Test1) WHERE T1._id = id
MERGE (T1)-[:HAS]->(T2)
And, of course, do not forget about the index.

Answer 2

Actually, at import time, you should be creating the :HAS relationships instead of creating the from property (which forces you to make a wasteful additional query to create the relationships, and leaves you with redundant from properties that you would probably want to delete).
For example, if you are using LOAD CSV to import, and your import file has test2Id and from columns (a string and a string collection, respectively), this import query should create all the nodes and relationships:
LOAD CSV WITH HEADERS FROM "file:///input.csv" AS row
MERGE (t2:Test2 {id: row.test2Id})
WITH row, t2
UNWIND row.from AS t1Id
MERGE (t1:Test1 {id: t1Id})
MERGE (t1)-[:HAS]->(t2);
For better performance, you would want indexes on both :Test1(id) and :Test2(id).