December 2012 Summaries

The Neo4j team has released a new milestone for version 1.9, focusing on stability and paving the way for a major dependency version upgrade in the next version. The update includes improvements to relationship-type IDs, Java7/OpenJDK support, high availability logging, server-side Tinkerpop integration, and Cypher internal refactoring with bug fixes.

The Neo4j World Wide Tour is a series of events where attendees can learn about graph databases and Neo4j, with sessions led by industry experts. The tour will cover cities on the East Coast, West Coast, and South-West of the United States, as well as major European cities like Stockholm, Paris, and London. The first part of the tour has been announced, with dates and locations revealed for events in Boston, Washington, Durham, Atlanta, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, and Denver. These events will feature talks on Neo4j, graph databases, and related topics, as well as opportunities to network with attendees. The tour is designed to spread "graph love" around the world and provide a platform for learning and sharing knowledge about graph technologies. Pernilla, the community manager at Neo Technology, invites individuals to host their own Neo4j meetups in their cities or contribute to the community.

In this latest maintenance release of Neo4j, version 1.8.1, the developers have focused on stability and performance improvements. The new Bidirectional Traverser Framework has been added to Cypher, reducing query times in some cases by a third. Memory consumption has also been optimized, allowing for faster execution of larger Cypher queries. Additionally, support for JVM and Java versions has been extended, with the removal of compilation issues for Java 7 on both Oracle JVM and OpenJDK. For enterprise customers, a new consistency checker has been added to ensure backups are in a good state, while fixes have also been made to the HA protocol around cluster formation. The developers strongly encourage users to upgrade to Neo4j 1.8.1 as soon as possible.

The latest Neo4j release (1.9.M02) boasts several improvements to speed up query execution, reduce memory usage, and enhance overall performance. The Cypher query language has been significantly enhanced, with lazy execution of queries restored and a new top-n-select algorithm implemented. Additionally, the Neo4j console now features interactive jQuery data result tables for in-browser filtering and searching, while the High Availability Cluster can be upgraded seamlessly to a Paxos-based implementation without downtime. Other notable improvements include sandboxed JavaScript traversals exposed via the Server REST API, an OrderByTypeExpander feature, and enhanced JMX monitoring information. Users are encouraged to test the latest release and provide feedback on its performance and usability.