Open Source Graph Database Project

History

The History of Neo4j — Open Source, Big Community

The development efforts on Neo4j began in 2000, when the co-founders, while on a project building a content management system, encountered a problem that couldn’t be solved with relational databases–so they invented the property graph. For the next 7 years, they continued developing, deploying and redeveloping Neo4j. After 17 years, look at some of their milestones:

2000Invented the property graph model
2003First graph database in 24/7 production
2007First “native” graph database with native storage and processing
2007Neo4j 1.0 released as open source and commercial packages
2009Graph databases added to NoSQL category of big data sources
2011Cypher launched as the only declarative query language for property graphs
2012Published Graph Databases from O’Reilly Media, launched GraphConnect conferences
2013Neo4j 2.0 released, extending model to “labeled” property graph and introduced visual IDE
2015openCypher standards project launched as “SQL for Graphs”
2016Neo4j 3.0 added user-defined/stored procedures called APOC (Awesome Procedures on Cypher), a cost-based query optimizer, the Bolt binary protocol and native drivers for Java, JavaScript, Python and .NET
2016Neo4j 3.1 introduced Causal Clustering, user and role-based security and directory integrations
2017Neo4j 3.2 released with multi-data center support, schema constraints, new indexes and new Cypher editor with syntax highlights and autocompletion
2019Neo4j joins the GraphQL Foundation as a founding member to support the evolution of GraphQL as it becomes a standard for building APIs

Licensing

Neo4j Licensing

The Neo4j Community Edition is licensed under the free GNU General Public License (GPL) v3 while the Neo4j Enterprise Edition is licensed under a Neo4j commercial license.

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