Neo Technology, creator of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, today announced the immediate general availability of Neo4j 3.0 — a landmark release propelling graph databases into the mainstream thanks to its massive scalability, new language drivers and a raft of other developer-friendly properties.

“Every aspect of the architecture has been revisited to make graph database development productive and intuitive, while at the same time supporting massive graphs — into the hundreds of billions and trillions of nodes and relationships,” commented Jim Webber, Neo Technology’s chief scientist. “We’ve achieved all of this whilst retaining Neo4j’s signature ‘minutes-to-milliseconds’ performance.”

Backed by a new binary wire protocol, Bolt, Neo4j 3.0’s new official language drivers, now available for Java, .NET, JavaScript and Python, transform the development experience, he noted. “Together these provide an entirely new and vastly more productive way for developers to work with the database.”

“Convenience is the killer app for mainstream tech adoption,” said James Governor, RedMonk co-founder and analyst. “Neo4j 3.0 aims to be more developer friendly thanks to Bolt and drivers for the most popular programming languages in their specific distribution systems.”

The new Neo4j 3.0 release offers a step change in the power to carry out real-time queries against graphs of massive size, while retaining its tremendous performance advantages. This is ideal for large-scale applications including real-time retail recommendations, on-the-fly fraud prevention and IoT applications.

“Before Neo4j 3.0, graph sizes were limited to tens of billions of records. With Neo4j 3.0, those limits go away,” said Neo Technology’s Vice President of Products, Philip Rathle. “We are already working with customers who are pushing into hundreds-of-billions scale graphs. This release takes them there — and beyond.”

“Neo4j 3.0 is our fastest, most powerful, easy-to-use and productive product yet,” Rathle said. “Most of our engineering goes into being the database that you can trust. We also spend a great deal of time thinking about new possibilities. The new language drivers together with Bolt radically change the way developers and applications interact with the database, offering enormous possibilities for innovative graph applications to emerge.”

Highlights of what’s new:

  • A new storage engine that does away with previous upper scaling limits while retaining Neo4j’s hallmark performance advantages
  • Bolt, a new lightweight and efficient binary protocol designed for lightning-fast access to the graph
  • New official, in-house language drivers for Java, .NET, JavaScript and Python
  • Support for Java Stored Procedures, allowing powerful features, such as schema introspection, to be added easily to the database and combined with the power of Bolt and Cypher
  • New cost-based query optimizer for writes, as well as improvements to Cypher performance throughout, producing better, faster queries across the board
  • A new configuration and logging structure to easily support modern deployment scenarios, making it easy to run Neo4j anywhere

In addition to all of the new features in Neo4j, Neo Technology has also launched a new companion cloud service: Neo4j Browser Sync. Available at no cost, this service augments Neo4j’s free developer tooling by letting users save and synchronize their favorite scripts and settings.