Release Date: 28 July 2014

Neo4j 2.1.3 is a maintenance release, with critical improvements.

Notably, this release addresses the following:

  • Resolves a critical caching issue, whereby queries against nodes containing relationships in a single direction (only incoming or only outgoing) could fail to find any relationships attached to the node.
  • Adds support for hexadecimal literals in Cypher statements.
  • Adds an exists(...) function in Cypher, for checking patterns and properties.
  • Rectifies a memory leak that occurred during transactions that only create new nodes or relationships.
  • Improves memory efficiency of Cypher statements when handling large volumes of data (e.g. during import with LOAD CSV).
  • Resolves an issue where instances could fail to join a HA cluster, if their state was too far behind (Neo4j Enterprise).
  • Resolves an issue where, after a HA cluster failover, schema constraints could lose their backing index (Neo4j Enterprise).
  • Resolves a rare issue where transactions could mistakenly fail with an IllegalStateException.
  • Improvements to caching and compile time for Cypher statements.

All Neo4j 2.x users are recommended to upgrade to this release. Upgrading to Neo4j 2.1 requires a migration to the on-disk store and can not be reversed. Please ensure you have a valid backup before proceeding, then use on a test or staging server to understand any changed behaviors before going into production.

Users who previously upgraded Neo4j 2.0 data stores to Neo4j 2.1.1 should consult our blog post regarding this release.

For a full summary of changes in this release, please review the CHANGES.TXT file contained within the distribution.