Neo4j has released a first Release Candidate (RC) for Neo4j 1.9, which is now available for download. This release includes several incremental changes from the last Milestone (1.9-M05). The key changes focus on High Availability, Backup, and Cluster improvements. Notably, the experimental mechanism for automatically assigning server IDs has been changed to require manual configuration, while an experimental feature that introduced a central cluster definition URI has been removed due to its underuse. Additionally, new features have been added to improve cluster formation, index provider functionality, server performance, Cypher queries, and packaging. The Neo4j team invites users to download and test the release candidate thoroughly to help identify any issues before the final General Availability (GA) release.