Introducing Neo4j 2.3: Intelligent Applications at Scale


Highly anticipated release delivers the greatest, fastest, most scalable native graph database to date, with enhanced developer and DevOps enablement

SAN FRANCISCO – Oct. 21, 2015 – GraphConnect – Neo Technology, creator of Neo4j, the world’s leading graph database, today announced the immediate availability of Neo4j 2.3, with major updates allowing organizations to derive maximum value from their data relationships.

Enhancements to Neo4j 2.3 include support of intelligent applications at scale, along with enhanced developer and DevOps enablement with official Docker support.

“Neo4j 2.3 is the latest advancement in the Neo4j series, offering the best, fastest and most scalable release to date,” said Neo Technology’s Vice President of Products, Philip Rathle. “Our team embarked upon a two-year process to offer powerful new features based off enterprise needs and community feedback. We’re extremely excited about today’s release and look forward to seeing the impact on graph applications worldwide from our most powerful release of Neo4j yet.”

Neo4j 2.3 promises to make things even more convenient for developers. As more projects come to rely on Neo4j, it’s become clear that having a schema definition that goes beyond the simpler “the schema is the data” perspective on the model is very useful for communication, productivity and governance.

Key Neo4j 2.3 Features include:

Intelligent applications at scale – Today’s applications must be smarter and faster than ever, supporting analytic transactions in real time to solve tomorrow’s challenges. Intelligent applications seamlessly apply and follow business rules within a connected context, harnessing data relationships to extract insights that were previously thought impossible.

Neo4j 2.3 offers significant improvements in performance and operability at scale to support intelligent applications. These include enhanced scale-up capability for massive graphs that breaks free of JVM-imposed limitations, richer query development with graph and text string search, and improved Cypher performance that features a smarter query planner.

Developer enablement: productivity and governance – Schema definitions that go beyond the simple “the schema is the data” perspective on the model are very useful for communication, productivity and governance. Neo4j 2.3 expands on the initial notions of schema / meta model provided by relationship types (Neo4j version 1.x), and labels and unique constraints (Neo4j version 2.0).

This has uses for both the individual and the team, with benefits ranging from data quality and governance to collaboration to data integration.

Additional developer enablement features in Neo4j 2.3 include:
  • New drivers and integrations – especially Spring Data Neo4j 4.0

  • Multiple Cypher query language improvements

  • New Neo4j Browser options for improved accessibility

DevOps enablement for on-premise and cloud – As more environments embrace polyglot persistence, the number of databases that need to be managed continues to increase in complexity and number.

Neo4j 2.3 makes it easier for IT professionals to operate Neo4j both on-premise and in the cloud, and enables DevOps teams by flattening learning curves and getting projects going quickly and easily integrating into existing architectures. New features include: official Docker support, simplified Windows management with full support for Windows PowerShell, improved third-party monitoring integration with Neo4j metrics, faster backups, updates and bulk loading of data.

Graphs are Eating the World

Neo Technology continues to address a tremendous need for powerful graph database technology, as Forrester Research analysts have reported that graph databases will reach over 25 percent of all enterprises by 2017. The wide and rapid adoption of graphs is demonstrated by Neo’s impressive client roster, which includes a broad spectrum of Global 2000 companies from a variety of industries. These comprise of adidas Group, Walmart and eBay Inc. (Retail), Telenor Group and CenturyLink (Telecommunications), Scripps and Earthlink (Media and Broadcasting), Cisco Systems, Inc. (Software), and UBS Financial Services, Inc. and Nomura Securities Co. Ltd (Financial Services and Insurance), just to name a few.


To learn more about Neo4j 2.3, visit: https://neo4j.com/whats-new-in-neo4j-2-3/

To download Neo4j 2.3 immediately, visit: https://neo4j.com/download/.

Neo Technology is also proud to announce its collaboration with IBM to introduce Neo4j on IBM POWER8, and its new openCypher open source project.

All trademarks and registered trademarks, including Neo Technology ® and Neo4j ® are the property of their respective owners.