Neo4j 2.0.0-RC1 – Final preparations

 

WARNING:

This release is not compatible with earlier 2.0.0 milestones

. See details below.

 

The next major version of Neo4j has been under development for almost a year now, methodically elaborated and refined into a solid foundation. Neo4j 2.0 is now feature-complete. We’re pleased to announce the first Release Candidate build is available today.

With that feature-completeness in mind, let’s see what’s on offer…

Cypher Syntax – finishing touches

 

Two guiding principles of Cypher language design are readability and internal consistency. The basic syntax should be easy to understand, with little ambiguity about the intent of a query. This release has a number of changes that follow those principles, resulting in much nicer looking syntax, with more clear semantics.

MATCH with properties

Cypher
CREATE

and

MERGE

clauses can have patterns with properties in them, but that syntax wasn’t previously supported in the

MATCH

clause. Now you can include properties in any pattern. This makes simple queries more concise; a query like this:

Can now be written like this:

OPTIONAL MATCH

Sometimes your data isn’t all the same – you are looking for a core pattern, but some matches have additional detail attached. We call this additional detail ‘optional’ because it isn’t required to match the core pattern (a bit like an outer join in SQL).

Previously, we expressed optional details with optional relationships, using the
-[?]->

syntax. However, this sometimes proved confusing. To resolve the ambiguity,

 

Stefan Plantikow

 

came up with an excellent solution: separate the concerns.

Everything in a
MATCH

is now required, so the

?

operator has been removed. For optional patterns, use the new

OPTIONAL MATCH

, which either returns matching data, or

null

if nothing is found.

For example, you can write:

This will find all Person nodes. If a person has a spouse, Neo4j find them, otherwise b will be
null

. Lovely!

MERGE for relationships

Cypher has built-in support for ‘get-or-create’: with a single query you can find existing data, or create it if it’s missing. Since this is a common operation for any database, we wanted to make it work very well in Cypher. To get-or-create, you use
MERGE

for single nodes or

MERGE

for relationships (but not both at the same time).

MERGE

for relationships replaces the old

CREATE UNIQUE

clause.

For example, to get-or-create a relationship between two nodes:

Simpler syntax for MERGE ON MATCH and ON CREATE

When use a
MERGE

clause in your query, there are two possible outcomes: Neo4j will either find all existing matching data, or create entirely new data. The special sub-clauses

ON MATCH

and

ON CREATE

allow to you to distinguish between these outcomes.

We’ve simplified the syntax of the
ON MATCH

and

ON CREATE

clauses, removing the need to cite an identifier from the related

MERGE

pattern. Where you used to write:

You can now write (dropping the ‘a’ in
ON CREATE

):

NULL != NULL

We’ve changed the way Cypher handles
null

in important ways: Many expressions now return

null

for invalid arguments (

HEAD([])

, Slicing, e.g.

[][1..3]

). We’ve embraced

 

ternary logic

 

by allowing

null

to be used as a “maybe” value in expressions with

AND

,

OR

,

NOT

meaning it’s easier to compute predicates when information (like property values) is missing.

For more details, refer to the Neo4j Manual section on 

working with null

 

.

Caution: manual upgrade between milestones

 

Data stores created with any previous milestone version can not be used with 2.0.0-RC1 unless a manual upgrade is performed
. This is due to incompatible changes made to the store files. Please proceed with caution, backing up your data before attempting to manually upgrade.

Manual upgrade (only from 2.0.0-M06, and after you’ve backed up):

Cleanly shut down on the old version on Neo4j 2.0.0-M06 $ bin/neo4j stop Navigate to the database directory $ cd data/graph.db Delete the label scan store (this is the critical part that has a new format). It will be recreated on startup. $ rm -rf schema/label Start with the new version of Neo4j 2.0.0-RC1 $ bin/neo4j start

Breaking changes

 

While this release is feature complete, there are some breaking changes since milestone 6.

Breaking changes include:

For all the details, please refer to the 

2.0.0.RC1 changelogs

 

.

Next steps

 

Now that the Release Candidate is ready, we’d love for you to try it out. Between now and the GA release, we will only be including bug fixes. Give us feedback about any issues you might encounter, reporting problems on our
google group
and asking questions on
Stack Overflow
.

Cheers,

Andreas, on behalf of Team Neo