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.