Hello graphistas, It’s been six milestones since we started development of our 1.4 release. Today we present to you Neo4j 1.4 “Kiruna Stol”, our finest release yet, with a host of feature additions and performance and usability improvements.
*Cypher Query Language* In addition to Gremlin, you can now use our new declarative query language named Cypher. It has a readable, simple yet expressive syntax that DBAs will feel comfortable with. For example, the usual friend of a friend query can be concisely expressed in Cyhper in just three lines: START user = (mail-index, name, "John") MATCH user-[:SENT_MAIL_TO]-> () -[:SENT_MAIL_TO]-> fof RETURN fof *Auto Indexing* Indexes are essential for long-lived names in a graph. But Neo4j’s indexes have, to-date, made you work hard. The 1.4 GA release allows properties to be automatically indexed by the database through the new Auto Indexing API. This API allows users to define names of properties and have them automatically added, removed and updated in your index consistently with the underlying graph. *Indexing improvements* But Auto Indexing is not the end of improvements in the index front. Our implementation of index provider has been upgraded to Lucene 3.1 which, thanks to the hard work from the Lucene community, brings significant performance boosts across the whole range of operations. This changes comes with an upgrade to the index on-disk format though, so keep that in mind when upgrading and don’t forget to backup important data. *Self Relationships* One of the most requested features by the community has been the ability to create relationships from a node to itself, commonly referred to as self relationships. As of 1.4 GA you can create self relationships using the existing createRelationshipTo() method. Of course when you’re traversing a graph, try not to get stuck in those loops! *Performance Improvements* One of our favorite passtimes is finding new ways to cut down time spent in the database code paths, giving you more time to manage your data. In the kernel you will find changes that have made small transactions significantly faster and also improvements in the cache that take in consideration the direction of relationships, enabling faster in-memory lookups. *REST Improvements* We’ve devoted a lot of time bringing some much needed usability improvements to those folks who use Neo4j server. The index management operations that were exclusive to the embedded API are now exposed over REST also, so now you can create and delete indexes, as well as perform arbitrary queries. The traversers are now capable of being paged, reducing the network overhead and allowing for more flexibility in your code. Finally, the concept of batch commands has been introduced, giving a substantial performance boost for larger, predictable sequences of operations like bulk uploads. *Webadmin Improvements* The Webadmin tool has received a facelift and some useful new features that. A new Index Management tab gives DBAs full control over indexes with a simple point-and-click interface. We’ve added two new command line interfaces to the Consoles tab: one for our Cypher query language, and one for those that prefer working over HTTP with a curl-like tool. All that along with many bug fixes and improvements for better cross platform support are just a browser window away! *New server management scripts* A major pain, especially for OSX users, has been the server management scripts. “Kiruna Stol” comes with our own, home grown scripts for *nix systems and batch scripts for Windows machines that actually work and are far more pleasant than the previous third-party wrapper scripts. *Download!* Now the code’s ready, we’d love for you to download and tryout “Kiruna Stol” and tell us what you think. Feedback from our community is what drives us, and we are eager to hear what you think. For more details on this GA, see the release blog post at http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/07/announcing-neo4j-14-kiruna-stol-ga.html and, as always, get the latest release at http://neo4j.org/download/ Happy hacking! -- Jim Webber _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list User@lists.neo4j.org https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
