Neo Technology, creators of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, today announced the release of Neo4j version 1.8. Available immediately, the new version is even faster, and easier to maintain and upgrade.
Highlights:
1. Performance. The 1.8 release makes an already-fast database even faster, with improved performance over the network thanks to a new REST streaming capability, as well as new traversal features in the query engine. Together, these changes make 1.8 our fastest release ever.
2. Cypher query language. Cypher is a graph query language unique to Neo4j, that makes it easy for developers to interact with the database: much like SQL makes it easy to interact with a relational database. Neo4j users have been turning to Cypher because of its power, expressiveness, and ease of use. Neo4j 1.8 expands Cypher by adding support for write operations. This boosts end-user productivity, and makes Neo4j more accessible.
3. Easier administration though Rolling Upgrades. Organizations using Neo4j Enterprise can now upgrade to the latest version without disturbing the operation of their Neo4j cluster. Rolling upgrades allow a cluster to be upgraded one node at a time, without incurring any downtime.
Neo4j 1.8 also includes the following features:
• Zero-downtime rolling upgrades in HA clusters
• Streamed responses to REST API requests
• Bi-directional traversals, branch state and path expanders in the traversal framework
• Support in the Cypher language for writing graph data and updating auto-indexes
• Support for explicit transactions in neo4j-shell
Neo4j 1.8 is fully backward-compatible with applications written for 1.6 and 1.7, and can be easily upgraded as a service release. For a full summary of changes in this release, visit CHANGES.TXT, which is also included in the download.
