Your query actually doesn't make sense as you can't aggregate and then sort by something that's not returned. :) I mean expressing this is easy and the executi

Your query actually doesn't make sense as you can't aggregate and then sort by something that's not returned. :) I mean expressing this is easy and the execution is also straightforward, e.g. in Neo4j: MATCH (lunch:Lunch)<-[:PART_OF]-(drink:Drink) RETURN lunch, COUNT(drink) ORDER BY lunch.delivery_date, lunch.total_price this would be a more efficient variant: MATCH (lunch:Lunch) RETURN lunch, size((lunch)<-[:PART_OF]-()) as drinks ORDER BY lunch.delivery_date, lunch.total_price So I don't agree with the statement, that everything which is not recursive is better served by and RDBMS. There is more than one use-case for your data most use-cases in real applications are more than mildly complex. And GraphDBs might not be much faster on those types of queries but they are also not tremendously slower.