Neo4j 1.3 “Abisko Lampa” M02- Moving Day

It’s milestone release time again. For this time, let me just summarize what we’ve been up to the last two weeks, guided by the distant light of Abisko Lampa.

First of all, the community (that’s YOU!) has been fantastic over the last two weeks. Thanks for helping with questions, comments and remarks making Neo4j better – keep it up!

Forwarding address: https://github.com/Neo4j

We’ve packed up and moved our source repositories over to GitHub, now living at https://github.com/Neo4j. While settling into our new digs, we’ve re-arranged things into multi-module projects with top-level parents that make checking out and building a bit simpler.

Being sentimental, we’re keeping the old Subversion repository in read-only mode, for historical tours.

Stop by for a visit on GitHub, feel free to fork away and send in pull requests. We are always thankful for contributions – and you will get a Neo4j baseball cap from us!

Chris Gioran aka DigitalStain

Re-arranging the furniture

Our components are now in the same room together, easy to grab and build if you want to work from the source. What’s in that room? Neo4j 1.3.M02 now contains:

neo4j-kernel: core graphdb engine

neo4j-graph-algo: optimized graph algorithm library

neo4j-kernel-com: low-level communication implementations between Neo4j instances

neo4j-ha: high availability system

neo4j-lucene-index: a Lucene based index provider

neo4j-management: monitoring and JMX exposure facilities

neo4j-udc: usage data collector subsystem

Also, note that the version numbers of all core components now match the release – 1.3.M02 – dropping the previous prefixing of distinct component version.

New backup library

Taking advantage of the High Availability communication features, we’ve re-implemented the Neo4j backup library. Both incremental and full backups are now pretty simple, just borrow this little code snippet:

GraphDatabaseService db = new EmbeddedGraphDatabase("db");
OnlineBackup.from( "localhost" ).full( "backupdir" );
//do stuff
OnlineBackup.from( "localhost" ).incremental( "backupdir" );
db.shutdown();

Web administrivia

The server’s Webadmin UI has been spruced up, we’ve added a bit of spit-n-polish to repair some blemishes and bashed out some small dents.

Performance improvements

Log rotation within the kernel has been significantly sped up, which will improve overall performance especially when small transactions are executed.

High Availability setup improvements

There have been a number of efforts being done to wrap the HA setup of Neo4j in different environments. Andreas Ronge has done a great job exposing a simple interface in the HA scripts for Neo4j JRuby and there are now some really useful Chef and Vagrant recipes

Upgrade to Gremlin 0.7 in the server

Our good friend, the graph cruncher Marko Rodriguez, has a revamped Groovy-based incarnation of the Gremlin graph language – an easy way to describe graph operations on top of the Groovy scripting language. With this, you can do supercool stuff on graphs directly in the Webadmin tool, check the state of your graph, or prototype stuff.



That’s all for now, and let us know any comments, issues or thoughts you have!

/peter