Neo4j 1.7.M01 – “Bastuträsk Bänk”


With the release train now headed to Bastuträsk Bänk, we are excited to present the first milestone of the Neo4j 1.7 series.

Cypher evolution

The Cypher language continues to evolve nicely, incorporating insightful feedback from real world use cases. This version adds new concepts, and make minor adjustments to existing syntax, to make things easier, more powerful and clear.
You will surely enjoy these changes:
  • Added literal collections and the IN predicate
  • Added HEAD, TAIL, LAST and FILTER
  • Added comments
  • Added ! so that missing property can evaluate to false
  • The column names are now exactly as written in the RETURN expression
  • BREAKING CHANGE: To check whether a property exists on a node, use the HAS(…) function
  • Arithmetic functions
  • An identifier can now be assigned all the nodes/rels in the graph – START a=node(*)
  • Fixed issues #196, #164, #193, #217, #214, #201, #198, #240, #254
For all the details about the updated syntax, please see the full Cypher section in the authoritative manual.

SSL Support, wildcard rules for Neo4j Server

In environments where it is beneficial, you will appreciate SSL Support for Neo4j server, encrypting access across standard HTTPS (details in the documentation).
A nice complement is that security rules can now use wildcards, like:
public String forUriPath()
{
return "/protected/*";
}

Documentation goodies

We have been working on improving the documentation in various places and structures, moving interesting parts to more prominent places. Also, we started to improve the readability of the automatically generated graphviz-graphs by assigning automatic color schemes to relationships as a first step.

High Availability improvements

On the HA side, a number of issues have been improved, which also led to the maintenance releases 1.5.2 and 1.6.1 (you should upgrade if you are running these major versions). Btw, if you want to set up Neo4j HA in less than 5 minutes on your local machine, try out

git clone git://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-enterprise-local-qa.git
cd neo4j-enterprise-local-qa
rake setup_cluster


And you should have a local cluster running.

Blueprints 1.2, Gremlin 1.5

Following the recent update of the excellent Tinkerpop stack, we have updated Neo4j to work with the newest stable releases, which fixes a number of bugs around cleaning the database and index handling through Gremlin.

Bugs? Nah – issues!

Also, there has been a slew of fixes related to Cypher, the REST API, documentation and the Webadmin, see Github changelog for a full list of high-level code changes.

As always, please report any issues you have, enjoy coding and thanks to all core contributors, and all of you making this an awesome community to change the world. Get the milestone here while it’s hot 🙂

Peter Neubauer



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