Neo4j Democratizes Connected Data for Businesses and Users with 3.4 Release

Neo4j extends industry lead with latest version, delivers visualization tools for business users

SAN FRANCISCO – May 2, 2018 – Neo4j, the leading platform for connected data, today announced Neo4j 3.4, which includes horizontal scaling, performance improvements of more than 50 percent, 3D geospatial search, and numerous operational improvements.

Delivering on the company’s vision to make connected data – powered by graph database technology – accessible to more types of users, the company announced the release of an additional new product, Neo4j Bloom, which simplifies communication between developers and business stakeholders.

Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder of Neo4j, believes these capabilities are essential to mainstay graph technology use cases such as fraud detection, real-time recommendation engines and knowledge graphs powering artificial intelligence.

“If you look at our customers today, they have proven that connected data transforms any business,” said Eifrem. “With Neo4j 3.4 and Neo4j Bloom we’ve extended the capabilities of the Neo4j Graph Platform both to make it more accessible and easy-to-use, and to stay ahead of the increasing performance demands of our existing customers."

Data Visualization for Non-Technical Users

Neo4j Bloom is a search-based graph visualization product that transforms the abstract concepts of data relationships into tangible, easy-to-understand illustrated views of data.

"Neo4j Bloom is specifically designed to illuminate connections between data points in an intuitive way, especially for executives and stakeholders who might not be very technical," said Eifrem.

Neo4j Bloom is fully integrated with the Neo4j Graph Platform. Unlike traditional data discovery tools, Bloom reveals how data elements are related to each other, visualizing the context that these connections expose.

Without knowing a query language, users explore the graph through search phrases and then zoom in and select nodes in the graph to review and edit their properties. They can also create storyboards for better collaboration between different stakeholders. The product is expected to be released by quarter’s end.

Neo4j Bloom

An example graph data visualization using Neo4j Bloom.

New Features in Neo4j Database

Because Neo4j works with thousands of organizations that grapple with ever-increasing datasets that reach more people than ever, the Neo4j database must keep pace. Improvements in the 3.4 release  include:

  • Multi-Clustering: Users can create and manage multiple cluster-based tenants, where each operates within its own scalable Causal Cluster. As a step toward fully-sharded horizontal scaling, Multi-Clustering can be used to logically partition graphs; create highly-available, large-scale multi-tenant SaaS systems; or oversee multiple graph database implementations across the enterprise; for example, building GDPR-compliant data lineage systems by country.

  • Date/Time and 3D geospatial data types. Neo4j 3.4 extends use cases by adding date/time and three dimensional geospatial search functions to Cypher. Customers can now easily build radial search functions like, “find all available sales personnel within 100 miles whose technical skills align with this partner” or real-time bicycle delivery systems that consider the distance to address, the time of day and the elevation changes in their calculations.  

  • Performance improvements: Neo4j maintains its performance leadership with 70 percent faster Cypher execution, 100 percent faster backups, and 30-50 percent faster data loading and overall writes due to native string indexes.

  • Administration and security: Administrators now have new diagnostic tooling, automatic cache warming upon restart, property-level security and – from now on – rolling upgrades.   

Eifrem believes the Neo4j 3.4 and Neo4j Bloom releases each expand the reach of graph technology within the enterprise due to its uncanny ability to drive innovation.

"Our investments in the Neo4j database extend its ability to scale and drive new use cases for our current customers," Eifrem said. "Graph databases are an enterprise standard, and the introduction of Neo4j 3.4 and Neo4j Bloom means more people will discover the power and value of connected data.”

To learn more about Neo4j 3.4, please visit: https://neo4j.com/whats-new-in-neo4j/

About Neo4j, Inc.          

Neo4j, Inc. is the graph company behind the leading platform for connected data. The Neo4j graph platform helps organizations make sense of their data by revealing how people, processes and digital systems are interrelated. This connections-first approach powers intelligent applications tackling challenges such as artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations and master data.

The company boasts the world’s largest dedicated investment in native graph technology, has amassed more than ten million downloads, and has a huge developer community deploying graph applications around the globe. More than 270 commercial customers, including global enterprises like Walmart, Comcast, Cisco, eBay and UBS use Neo4j to create a competitive advantage from connections in their data.

Neo4j is privately held and funded by Eight Roads Ventures (an investment arm of Fidelity International Limited), Sunstone Capital, Conor Venture Partners, Creandum, Dawn Capital and Greenbridge Investment Partners. Headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., Neo4j has regional offices in Sweden, Germany and the UK. For more information, please visit Neo4j.com and @Neo4j.