Neo4J is cloud bound as Version 1.6 is now GA

January 26, 2012 Chris Mayer

The popular NoSQL graph database makes bold claims for the next version.

The latest version of highly-acclaimed Java-implementable NoSQL graph database Neo4J has been released, with an extra bonus for users – a public beta for a Heroku based cloud solution that could take things to the next level.

Director of Engineering at Neo Technology, Bjorn Granvik broke the news on the team’s blog to showcase some of the new features for the 1.6 release. The public beta of the Neo4j Add-on for Heroku is probably the biggest extension, with the team quick to state their trepidation by pursuing a cloud future. Granvik said:

We’re taking a careful approach with our cloud services, evaluating the best supporting infrastructure and user experience in preparation for a general release in the coming months. Already, we’ve been pleased with the positive response.

A lot of work has been done with the query language Cypher within Neo4j, although from a glance it may not be noticable with much being done internally. The type system has been rebuilt and revamped, and a second simpler, pattern matcher has been added, which should make the code base and queries run that much quicker. Granvik explained more of the Cyper changes:

User facing changes include: possibility to get all shortest paths, the COALESCE function, column aliasing, and the possibility for variable length relationships to introduce an iterable of the relationships.

More, array properties have been supported in Neo4j for a long time, but until now it wasn’t possible to query on them. This release makes it possible to filter on array properties in Cypher. We have also improved aggregation performance.

Finally, there are two breaking changes – the syntax for the ALL/NONE/ANY/SINGLE predicates has changed, and the ExecutionResult is now a read-once, forward only iterable.

Other enhancements within this release include an improved web admin interface, including fully integrated Shell Neo4j commands, kernel changes and an upgrade to Lucene 3.5. The team are eager to hear feedback from the community and will make notes of improvements suggested for later releases. Download now!