Release Notes: Neo4j 5

Neo4j 5.13 (23 Oct 2023)

Highlights

• APOC Core 5.13.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.10.0 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.12.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.5.1 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.8.2 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Vector Search Index leaves beta. Vector search, the db.index.vector.createNodeIndex and db.index.vector.queryNodes procedures are no longer beta features, they are complete and ready for production use.
• Spring AI support for Neo4j as a vector store Java developers using Spring AI to streamline application development can choose Neo4j as their vector store. Spring AI documentation here.
• Change Data Capture (CDC) feature is now available as a public beta. CDC can be used by applications to query the transaction logs for changes to graph data. It can be enabled on individual databases in FULL or DIFF mode using Cypher’s CREATE or ALTER database commands
• Browser DB switcher updated to handle new database states.
• Browser autocomplete improvement: Signature details panel now expanded by default.

Language and Graph Model

• Improved planning of pattern predicates that previously weren’t using Argument. 
• Introduces char_length() and character_length() functions which return the number of Unicode characters in a STRING. They are aliases  of the existing size()  Cypher function (when applied to a string parameter), and are introduced to align with the upcoming GQL standard. More info available here. 
• Parallel runtime is General Availability – the new runtime can offer a  significant performance increase for some read queries; e.g. where a query traverses a large proportion of the large dataset, anchored to a super-node, the query is long-running (>~500ms).  Documentation available here. 
• Introduce LOAD ALL DATA privilege to control access to LOAD CSV from RBAC. Permission to LOAD all data will be automatically granted to the PUBLIC role to maintain compatibility. If administrators desire to control LOADS they should revoke this privilege and grant privileges to roles as required. Documentation available here. 
• Introduces a new valueType() function which returns a string representation of the most precise value type that the given expression evaluates to. Documentation available here. 
• Adds the functionality to use a graph which contains a given element id, e.g. USE graph.byElementId(“4:c0a65d96-4993-4b0c-b036-e7ebd9174905:0”). This functionality is available on a composite database, where one of the constituents contains the element. Documentation available here.

Operability & Observability 

• Size restricted default transaction logs retention policy used in the default config.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.x is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.13, with future support to 5.x+n.

Fixes

• Browser
  • Fix plan view for DbHits over 32 bit integer max

• Cypher
  • Fixed bug where Cypher queries containing related equalities in different scopes, e.g. WHERE any(x IN [1, 2, 3] WHERE a.prop = toInteger(x)) AND a.prop = b.prop would fail with Variable … not defined. Disable the transitiveEqualities rewriter if the WHERE clause contains multiple scopes.
  • Fixed procedure and function signatures to be inline with the syntax for Cypher Types. Procedures with no return values are no longer appended with :: VOID and function return values are no longer surrounded by parenthesis. Procedure signatures will now follow the pattern: “procedureName(param1 :: TYPE, param2 :: TYPE, .., paramN :: TYPE) :: (returnParam1 :: TYPE, returnParam2, .., returnParamN :: TYPE)” or “procedureName(param1 :: TYPE, param2 :: TYPE, .., paramN :: TYPE)” and function signatures: “functionName(param1 :: TYPE, param2 :: TYPE, .., paramN :: TYPE) :: TYPE”, see the Cypher Manual for more information. This alters the output of the signatures column in SHOW PROCEDURES and SHOW FUNCTIONS.
  • Resolve a rare bug where aggregation functions would be planned incorrectly, resulting in an error during runtime. This would happen for very specific and rare underlying statistics.
  • Free the memory of unused variables during Cypher query execution.

• Kernel
  • Deprecating beta function db.create.setVectorProperty in favor of db.create.setNodeVectorProperty, both improving naming consistency and extensibility. The new procedure no longer returns the node which enhances the user experience of the procedure in more complex queries. (Aura)
  • Fixed an issue that caused terminating the creation of a Constraint, to not also terminate the creation of the backing Index.
  • Fixed issue that caused vector search queries to cause an exception if there were changes in the transaction state.
  • Fixed issue that caused two index queried metrics (index.fulltext.queried and index.lookup.queried) to not update.

• Packaging
  • Bugfix where neo4j.conf without a trailing new line would get NEO4J_PLUGINS settings wrongly appended causing startup failure.
  • The streams plugin was erroneously listed as being a supported plugin in 5.x versions. This has been removed from 5.x docker source (the plugin integration remains in 4.4 and earlier images).

• Security
  • Upgraded commons-compress to 1.24.0 to mitigate CVE-2023-42503
  • Upgraded jetty to 10.0.16 to mitigate CVE-2023-40167, CVE-2023-36479, CVE-2023-41900, and GHSA-58qw-p7qm-5rvh

Neo4j 5.12 (14 Sept 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.12.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.9.0 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.11.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.4.6 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.8.0 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Recommend downloading the latest version Neo4j Ops Manager 1.8.1 which includes some important fixes. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Improved argument validation in vector index procedures to improve error messages.
• Replace db.logs.query.annotation_data_as_json_enabled with db.logs.query.annotation_data_format to enable more formats, refer to docs.

Language and Graph Model

• New function db.nameFromElementId to resolve the database name for a given element id in Fabric graphs.

Read and Export Performance

• Track memory of de-referenced nodes and relationships in ProduceResult. This avoids some OutOfMemoryErrors in queries that return lots of nodes or relationships (e.g. MATCH (n) RETURN collect(n)). Resolves https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/issues/13204 where a query wrongly errors for variables within a CALL subquery that shadow outside variables.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.x is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.12, with future support to 5.x+n.

Fixes

• Clustering
  • Remove transaction size limit in Raft. Before this change, large transactions could be written to the raft log but not read. This could lead to unexpected behaviors, for example a leader could stop sending entries to its followers.
  • Database state STORE_COPYING will be reported as soon as the decision is made that a store copy is necessary.

• Kernel
  • Vector index creation includes a check to limit the dimensionality to an upper supported limit of 2048.
  • Fixed an issue with vector index creation during a rolling upgrade from a pre-5.11 database in a cluster, where all members have yet to roll onto the new version. Now vector indexes cannot be created until dbms.upgrade() has been called, indicating all members have been upgraded; which is the intended procedure for newer features during a rolling upgrade.
  • Fixed some issues around vector validation for the vector index. Some extreme component vectors were incorrectly flagged as valid; however, would return a score of 0, thus not affecting most queries. Otherwise valid cosine query vectors with a final component of ±0 would incorrectly be flagged as invalid.
  • Fixes an issue that logged vector index as being unknown, preventing recreation commands from being included in neo4j-admin database copy logs, and incorrect escaping for some cases of the recreation command with SHOW INDEXES
  • Fix issue where vector index based procedures were not being displayed with SHOW PROCEDURES
  • Fix wildcards(*) for command-line tools on Windows.
  • Fix Cypher type normalization during CSV import so that char is converted to String.

Neo4j 5.11 (15 August 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.11.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.9.0 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.11.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.4.4 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.7.3 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Vector Search (beta) Vector search enables  users to create vector indexes in Neo4j Database and then perform search using cosine or euclidean similarity. By combining graph and vector capabilities we can enhance graph applications and improve grounding of generative AI applications. See documentation.

Language and Graph Model

• Expand property type constraints with support for union types, e.g ZONED TIME | LOCAL TIME, INTEGER | LIST<INTEGER NOT NULL>.
• Extends Type Predicate Expressions to allow for multiple types to be checked at once (closed dynamic unions). E.g. IS :: INTEGER | FLOAT

Scale and Availability

• SHOW DATABASE now reports databases starting and stopping with values starting and stopping in column actualStatus.

Operability & Observability

• New index metrics: <prefix>.index.<indexType>.(queried|populated).
• Add :sysinfo command to Cypher Shell.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.x is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.11, with future support to 5.x+n.
• Migrate to Jetty 10 
• Update Apache Shiro to 1.12.0

Fixes

• Browser
  • SSO papercuts (more logs & make downloading them easier)
  • Fixed bug where :auto hint would not show
  • Fixed bug where metadata was incorrectly formated

• Cypher
  • Fixed two bugs around durations with fractional components. Negation was not properly propagated to the components, so that “-P0.5Y” was presented as 6 months rather than -6 months. Fractional minutes > 60 was not properly converted into hours, so that 1 h 72.5 min was presented as 1h 12 min 30s instead of 2h 12 min 30s.
  • Fixed https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/issues/13102 where a variable inside a subquery becomes undefined if after a WITH
  • Fixed github issue https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/issues/13215. Graph.names should only return the graphs the user has access to.
  • Add status code to TransactionFailureException. Prior to this PR TransactionFailure exception did not have any status code, which meant that they eventually were treated as DatabaseErrors. Also, in this PR the constructors for creating TransactionFailureException without giving a status code are deprecated.
  • Fixes neo4j/neo4j#13155, neo4j/neo4j#13189 and neo4j/neo4j#13191 where shadowing variables in SKIP and LIMIT caused unexpected errors.
  • Fixed bug in fused pipelined runtime ProjectEndpoints operator that could lead to incorrect results.

• Kernel
  • Fixed excessive logging caused by ArchiveProgressPrinter
  • Change behavior of ‘ALTER CURRENT USER SET PASSWORD’ to auto commit even when executed inside an explicit transaction.

Neo4j 5.10 (19 July 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.10.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.8.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.9.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.4.2 is compatible versions of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.7.1 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Language and Graph Model

• Property type constraints include support for list types, e.g LIST<STRING NOT NULL>, LIST<INTEGER NOT NULL>. The inner type of the list type cannot be nullable. 
• Introduces <SCALAR TYPE> NOT NULL variants to the Type Predicate Expression, e.g BOOLEAN NOT NULL, as well as non-property value types, and simple lists, e.g. MAP, NODE, RELATIONSHIP, PATH, LIST<SCALAR TYPE>, ANY, PROPERTY VALUE
• Deprecate property references across patterns in CREATE, e.g. CREATE (a {p:1}), ({p:a.p}) 

Scale and Availability

• Clusters can be configured to automatically enable new members that join the cluster by setting initial.dbms.cluster.automatically_enable_free_servers to true, the default is false.

Operability & Observability 

• New metric: check_point.flushed_bytes to show accumulated number of bytes written by checkpoint.
• New metric: dbms.routing.query.count.* counters for server-side routing decisions.
• Dynamic settings: server.memory.query_cache.shared_cache_num_entries and server.memory.query_cache.per_db_cache_num_entries settings can now be changed without restarting

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.10 is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
  • Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.10, with future support to 5.x+n.
  • Updated debian base image to bookworm-slim.
• New docker image based on redhat/ubi8-minimal.

Fixes

• Clustering
  • Fixed during automatic upgrade panicked servers will attempt to rid themselves of all raft leaderships.

• Cypher
  • Fixed neo4j/neo4j#13194 where toBooleanOrNull with an inner function of null would fail 
  • Fixed $13163 by making deprecation checks more type safe
  • Fixed a bug where predicates with uppercase NODES() and RELATIONSHIPS() functions would be planned as a Filter after VarExpand/ShortestPath instead of being applied directly during path search. 
  • Split(s, [a1, a2,…]) should return null if any delimiter (a_i) is null. See neo4j/neo4j#13196

Neo4j 5.9 (15 June 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.9.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.8.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.9.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.2.4 is the compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.6.3 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Browser – Graceful handles when some databases are unavailable.
• Browser – Faster bootup & better connection handling.
• Browser – Improve sysinfo frame consistency.
• Browser – Improve debug connectivity.
• Core API – Additional types to org.neo4j.graphdb.schema.ConstraintType.

• Quantified path patterns extend significantly the language pattern-matching capabilities of Cypher. It is now possible to match against repetitions of complex subpaths containing an arbitrary number of nodes and relationships.  
• Property type constraint: node and relationship properties can now be restricted to be of a specific type. Examples of how to create a type constraint for a STRING node property and for a  BOOLEAN relationship property.
  • CREATE CONSTRAINT nodePropertyStringType FOR (n:Label) REQUIRE n.prop IS :: STRING
  • CREATE CONSTRAINT relPropertyBooleanType FOR ()-[r:REL_TYPE]-() REQUIRE r.prop IS :: BOOLEAN
• Type predicate expressions to verify the type of a variable, literal, property or other Cypher expression, using syntax like n.prop IS :: STRING.
• Grant, deny and revoke roles and privileges will generate notifications when the commands have no effect.
• SHOW commands to see the list of all the available Neo4j privileges: SHOW SUPPORTED PRIVILEGES
• Check for deprecations: SHOW SETTINGS, SHOW FUNCTIONS and SHOW PROCEDURES commands now show deprecation information in a dedicated new column.

Scale and Availability

• Reduced overhead when running on operation systems with 64K memory page sizes.

Operability & Observability

• Combine time-based transaction log pruning strategy with max size limit.
• Collapse nested JSON objects in the query logger when db.logs.query.annotation_data_as_json_enabled setting is true.
• Client applications e.g. Neo4j Ops Manager can request a list of supported privileges that can be granted.
• Improved error handling and reporting when executing administration commands. Some administration commands will return more accurate status codes that may be different from those returned in previous versions.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.9 is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• DBMS upgrades automatically, once all servers are on matching versions – calling dbms.upgrade() is no longer required.
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.9, with future support to 5.9+n.

Fixes

• Clustering
  • Fixed bug where a server that was a designated seeder for a database couldn’t be reallocated for that database.
• Cypher
  • Fixed bug where updates would not always get applied before a LIMIT 0 or a WHERE false.
• Kernel
  • Fixed an issue where the CSV importer wouldn’t enforce the value of –bad-tolerance.
  • Fixed an issue with neo4j-admin database check where provided paths with the ‘.report’ extension were incorrectly interpreted as a directory.
  • Restored the stateless ConfiguredQueryLogger.
• Security
  • Browser – prevent storing credentials briefly before reading settings.

Neo4j 5.8 (16 May 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.8.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.7.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.6.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.3.6 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.5.4 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Language and Graph Model

• Changed the notification description for deprecated procedure return fields, deprecated functions and procedures without replacement to no longer include ‘is no longer supported’ as that was misleading.

Scale and Availability

• Panic DBMS when local system graph components are behind those installed in the system db.
• DBMS upgrade procedures will check all servers in a cluster are on matching versions before allowing an upgrade.

Platform & Supportability

• Improved configuration file validation output on startup.
• Add setting db.logs.query.annotation_data_as_json_enabled to configure the output format of annotation data in the query log to be JSON instead of a Cypher map.
• Configuration file character encoding can be overridden by the NEO4J_CONFIG_FILE_CHARSET environment variable.
• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.8 is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.8, with future support to 5.x+n.

Fixes

• Clustering
  • Backup metadata scripts created using neo4j-admin database backup will now include the cluster topology of the database to be backed up.

• Composite/ Fabric
  • Using map projections, e.g, RETURN n{.p1, p2: 2}, on composite databases could lead to wrong results.
• Cypher
  • Fix a bug in pipelined runtime that can cause bitIndex < 0: -1 errors in plans with OrderedUnion.
  • Fixed bug has occurred in the morsel runtime: The target morsel cannot hold the data to copy error. See Github issue: neo4j/neo4j#13148.
  • Fixed overflow when using a count store. See Github issue: neo4j/neo4j#13170.
  • Fixed issue where an error, arraycopy: length -1 is negative occurred, Github issue: neo4j/neo4j#13141
  • Fixed a bug with LIMIT that could lead to error: UnknownError:Failed to evaluate expression. See Github issue: neo4j/neo4j#13172 and neo4j/neo4j#13173.
  • Fixed unexpected TypeError when using the toStringOrNull function, for example in CREATE (n) RETURN reverse(toStringOrNull(n)).
  • Fixed bug in fused pipelined runtime that could lead to lost updates if a property was cached. For example when running queries like MATCH (n) WITH n.prop AS oldValue SET n.prop = n.prop + 1 WITH n.prop AS newValue RETURN * concurrently. Note, Cypher will not always prevent lost updates, see documentation for more details.
  • Handle large precision values in round, gh-issue https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/issues/13117
  • Fixes https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/issues/13106 and https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j/issues/13109 by changing the way Cypher checks for variable shadowing inside subqueries
  • Fail LOAD CSV <url> queries if the URL leads to a redirect that we can’t follow (protocol changes or Location header is missing).
  • Using map projections, e.g, RETURN n{.p1, p2: 2}, on composite databases could lead to wrong results.
  • Allow new unicode characters as whitespace

• Kernel
  • Neo4j-admin import default –strict option set to false due performance impact in some scenarios.
  • Fix an issue with using certain configuration settings, query options, built-in functions or procedures, containing the letter “i”, when running with a Turkish locale.
  • Fix neo4j.dbms.bolt.connections_idle metric

• Packaging

• • Fixed java dependencies to use java-17 metapackage provided by both openjdk and oracle java.
  • Fixed bug where Neo4j will automatically start on installation in debian.
  • Fixed 5.x bug where requesting apoc plugin actually installs apoc-core. Also added apoc-core as an optional plugin.
  • Add docker healthcheck
  • JVM additional configuration set by environment variable will now stop overriding default jvm configurations.

Neo4j 5.7 (20 April 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.7.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.7.0 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.6.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.3.3 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.5.3 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Browser has added codes to frame notifications.
• Browser has added :debug-connectivity frame to help debug bolt connections.
• Browser has aligned text table display of nodes with Cypher Shell.

Language and Graph Model

• Introduced two new constraint types: relationship property uniqueness and relationship key. Can be created with CREATE CONSTRAINT FOR ()-[r:TYPE]-() REQUIRE r.prop IS UNIQUE and CREATE CONSTRAINT FOR ()-[r:TYPE]-() REQUIRE r.prop IS REL KEY, respectively.
• Independently plan predicates containing sub-queries: the planner will now generate a better (faster) plan for some queries which include subqueries.
• Introduce error and status output for CALL IN TRANSACTIONS
• Introduced a new Status for transaction timeout.
• Deprecate the Cypher query option connectComponentsPlanner  – it will be removed in the next major version. 
• Deprecate the status code Neo.ClientNotification.Statement.SuboptimalIndexForWildcardQuery – it will be removed in the next major version. 

Operability & Observability

• Added WAIT to the ALTER DATABASE administration command.
• Improved memory performance for customers running large numbers of databases, there is a new shared cache (replaces the individual caches used by a database); enabled with server.memory.query_cache.sharing_enabled. When using the shared cache, databases may compete for cache space, but may not observe each other’s entries. Size of the shared cache is configured with server.memory.query_cache.shared_cache_num_entries.
• Adapt :param and :params in Cypher Shell to Cypher map based syntax, for example :param {a: 1, b: 1+1}. The existing arrow syntax is also still supported.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.7 is supported please follow the migration guide available here.
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from any 5.x to 5.7, with future support to 5.x+n.
• Evaluation mode extensions – contact your Neo4j representative or complete the Contact Us form to extend your 30 day trial.

Security

• Upgraded Jettison version to 1.5.4 to fix CVE-2023-1436
• Log a warning if a security provider is listed in dbms.security.authentication_providers or dbms.security.authorization_providers but is not available for use.

Fixes

• Browser
  • Fixed bug where plan view downloads got very low resolution.
• Clustering
  • Fixed bug where rafted system databases were unable to pass seed validation when the instances had initialmodeconstraints
• Composite/ Fabric
  • Fix virtual entities creation from procedure in the composite database.
• Cypher
  • Fixed queries using composite indexes and duplicated search terms e.g. a.p1 IN [1, 1, 1] AND a.p2 = 3, could return incorrect results.
  • Fixed broken query cancellation (ctrl+c) in Cypher Shell.
  • Fixed bug when reusing variable names in merge clauses with multiple relationships.
  • Fixed bug with error message “Unexpected error: out of bounds for object” when ORDER BY has a literal in certain cases.
  • Fixed seeking for an empty array causes an empty result even if a match existed in the index. 
• Kernel
  • Fixed an issue where a temporary read-only setting for a database could become permanent for some Lucene indexes.
  • ‘neo4j-admin report’ now correctly captures kubernetes style configs
  • Fixed a bug where some data would be lost from index during a full online backup. The data would still be present in the store, but the index would be inconsistent. Affected index types are FULLTEXT or TEXT and the data would only be lost on the backup client, the server would still have the correct data.
  • Fixed an issue where recovery would temporarily hold onto more memory than necessary, making it more likely for recovery to run out of heap on recovering very large transactions.
• Packaging
  • JVM additional configuration set by environment variable will now stop overriding default JVM configurations.
  • Attempting to load invalid NEO4J_PLUGINS values will produce a helpful error message. For example, NEO4J_PLUGINS='[“gds”]’ will now return: “gds” is not a known Neo4j plugin. Options are: apoc apoc-core bloom graph-algorithms graph-data-science graphql n10s streams
• Security
  • Fixed a bug where dropping a remote alias would not clean up access privileges correctly, causing any user with a role that has the privilege to fail to authorize.

Neo4j 5.6 (24 March 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.6.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 5.x-2.7.0 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.4.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.3.2 is compatible versions of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.4.3 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Support for bookmarks in HTTP Cypher Transactional API.
• Support for CALL {} IN TRANSACTIONS in HTTP Cypher Transactional API using the single request endpoint (e.g db/neo4j/tx/commit)
• NotificationCode class including severity level, category, title and code available in the public API

Language and Graph Model

• Introduce COLLECT Subqueries to collect the results of the subquery into a list. 

Scale and Availability

• Server Tags can be used in place of Server Groups. 
• Deprecate dbms.cluster.secondaryReplicationToggle please use dbms.cluster.secondaryReplicationDisable.

Operability & Observability 

• SHOW SETTINGS Cypher command lists all the configuration settings, replacing the need for the procedure dbms.listConfig. 
• Server Tags can be created using Cypher commands e.g. ALTER SERVER “Server01″ SET OPTIONS {tags:”us-west”}.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.6 is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from any 5.x version to 5.6, with future support to 5.6+n.
• Docker additional configuration settings via environment variable for JVM will now stop overriding default JVM configurations.
• Invalid NEO4J_PLUGINS values provide a helpful error message. For example: NEO4J_PLUGINS='[“gds”]’ will now return:  “gds” is not a known Neo4j plugin. Options are: apoc apoc-core bloom graph-algorithms graph-data-science graphql n10s streams 

Fixes

• Clustering

• • Revert setting name back to dbms.maxdatabases from server
• Composite/ Fabric
  • Fix possible deadlock in transaction termination
• Cypher
  • Fixed seeking for an empty array would lead to an empty result even if a match existed in the index.
  • Fixed bug for MERGE queries in pipelined runtime.
  • Fixed bug where unnecessary sort was planned for some queries beginning with an OPTIONAL MATCH.

• Kernel
  • Fixed an issue with migrate-configuration admin command where plugin settings were incorrectly handled
  • Fixed an issue where the importer could interpret a non-existent node ID from the relationships data as one of the imported nodes. A flag –strict has been added to the import command to control this added strict validation of the node IDs and is enabled by default. Running import with strict check enabled may have a negative performance impact during relationship import.
  • Fixed neo4j-admin database info –from-path path validation on paths external to standard config, which incorrectly failed on otherwise valid paths to databases.
  • Fixed issue with console appenders in server-logs.xml

Neo4j 5.5 (16 Feb 2023)

Highlights

• APOC 5.5.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is fully supported (included in Labs directory). Please refer to the change log for details
• Bloom 5.x-2.6.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.4.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.3.1 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.4.1 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Simplified query API in the official language drivers (Java, Python, .Net, JavaScript and Go) Complex aspects of the API are automated for users, with sensible default behaviors appropriate for all deployment modalities encapsulated in a Driver.ExecuteQuery API. Tagged as experimental.

Language and Graph Model

• Plan count store lookup for relationship endpoints.
• Deprecate differently ordered variables in UNION Clauses.

Scale and Availability

• ALTER DATABASE can update the topology from a single primary to many primaries.

Operability & Observability 

• neo4j-admin copy can perform in-place compact/clean-up of a database, setting the target to be the same as the source
• New command neo4j-admin server validate-config performs configuration validation without starting the server.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.x is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.2, with future support to 5.x+n.
• Prompts user to confirm that backups have been taken before the database is migrated from Neo4j 4.4 to 5.x.
• Accept the evaluation license in Docker when you don’t have a commercial license.

Security

• Retry calls to the OpenID Connect discovery endpoint if they do not succeed initially. This applies on initial database startup and if the configuration is updated with dbms.setConfigValue.

Fixes

• Clustering
  • Bug fix where a server went back and forth between pipeline and catch up mode even if there was no load.
  • Prevent system database bootstrapping with too few Raft members when there are discovery restarts between publishing the Raft member id and observing successful publication.
  • Fix issue where server-side routed transactions might not be retried when encountering transient errors
  • Fixed Neo.DatabaseError.General.UnknownError message: Cannot invoke “org.neo4j.driver.summary.InputPosition.offset()” because “pos” is null. This happens when queries that produce certain notifications are re-routed to another cluster member with server-side routing. 

• Cypher
  • Eagerness performed on node or relationships property or label when returning a full entity node.
  • Repeating a relationship variable in a pattern will not return any results and issue a warning, because a relationship is not permitted to be traversed more than once. 
  • Fixed a bug where an OPTIONAL MATCH with shortestPath, followed by DISTINCT, would fail during planning.
  • Fix a bug where SKIP and LIMIT are ignored for simple COUNT(…) aggregation queries that were solved with a CountFromCountStore plan.
  • Fix bug in scoping with self referencing variables in a CREATE clause used in conjunction with list comprehension.
  • Fix bug in MERGE ()-[:R]-()

• Kernel
  • Fixed an issue with property key names in importer CSV header couldn’t be parsed if they contained : characters. Now this works if the header entry also specifies a property type, e.g. my-key:with-colons:string
  • Recovery logging and dependencies adaptation
  • Fixed reporting of JVM memory metrics

• Packaging
  • Fix for system databases which cannot be migrated from Neo4j 4.4 to 5.x, users upgrading with deb/ rpm were left in an unrecoverable situation requiring a rebuild. During the upgrade the data directory is now moved to a new location to prevent data loss. Full upgrade instructions are available at: https://neo4j.com/docs/upgrade-migration-guide/current/version-5/
  • Fixed Ops Manager Server and Agent packaging, neo4j-enterprise-5.5.0-<distibution> has increased by approximately 123Mb.

• Security
  • Fix a bug where group to role mappings defined for OpenID connect in dbms.security.oidc.<provider>.authorization.group_to_role_mapping were not matched correctly with claims containing capital letters.
  • Upgraded Apache Shiro from 1.10.1 to 1.11.0. This version includes fixes for CVE-2023-22602

Neo4j 5.4 (26 Jan 2023)

Highlights

Products included

• APOC Core 5.4.1 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is  fully supported (included in Labs directory). Please refer to the changelog for details.
• Bloom 2.6.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details.  (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.4.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.2.7 is a compatible version of the connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions.  (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.3.3 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists 

• Browser updated to driver for 5.3.0 
• Browser handles connections to, and setting parameters for Composite databases.
• Browser includes alias names in the database selector. 
• Browser clears metadata when switching databases. 
• Browser displays product evaluation/ trial banners.
• Browser handles lost connection. 
• Drivers respond faster on failed routing discovery with more actionable messages
• Python driver serialization of Pythonic object types (NumPy arrays, Pandas dataframes, series and arrays, Tuples)

Language and Graph Model

• Generates warnings for queries with relationship type expressions that can never be fulfilled.
• Introduce new operator, IntersectionNodeByLabelsScan, for more efficient handling of queries like MATCH (n:A&B&C).

Scale and Availability

• Deprecate server.groups for initial.server.tags

Operability & Observability

• Command completion scripts for neo4j and neo4j-admin clients for Unix are installed automatically with deb and rpm.

Platform & Supportability

• Users can accept the trial license during install with the installers or NEO4J_ACCEPT_LICENSE_AGREEMENT=eval. While in trial mode they will receive reminders in Browser and Cypher Shell. The selection is logged in the neo4j.log file.
• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.4 is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.4, with future support to 5.x+n.
• Upgrading from 4.4 to 5.x prompts users to confirm that backups have been taken before continuing the upgrade. During the upgrade the data directory is also moved to a new location to prevent data loss.

Security

• JWT claims specified in dbms.security.oidc.<provider>.claims.groups may now contain a single group returned as a string as well as a list of groups as was previously required. 

Fixes

• Browser
  • Fix bug where email was not supported as a username in :server user list.
  • Fix performance issues with browser background metadata for RBAC users.
  • Fix indent formatting in nested objects.
  • Fix relationship stylings not getting applied.
  • Fix role cluster role incorrectly reported as leader.
  • Fix :auto didn’t handle newlines.

• Cypher
  • Fixed problem where Cypher queries with DELETE inside CALL would not return correct results. The fix was to insert a missing Eager operator.
  • Fixed show database entries with undetermined roles null are returned rather than unknown.
  • Fixed a bug where frequently executed queries were never re-planned. This could happen if the time between executions of a query was always less than cypher.min_replan_interval, and cache space was generous enough.
  • Fixed bug for list literals with IN expressions.

• Kernel
  • Fixed an issue in import where some date value types didn’t handle empty values from the CSV files.
  • Fixed a couple of small issues with TX log rotation.
  • Fixes a performance issue creating Lucene indexes where workers ended up waiting unnecessarily on other threads for merging internal Lucene segment files.

• Packaging
  • Resolved: upgrade using the deb or rpm packages left in an unrecoverable situation where Neo4j will not start because of an non migratable system database: Fix: the data directory is now moved to a new location to prevent data loss. The system database must be rebuilt entirely on upgrade. Full upgrade instructions are available at: https://neo4j.com/docs/upgrade-migration-guide/current/version-5/

• Security
  • Fixed some security issues.
  • Fixed bug in privilege evaluation for the ALTER DATABASE command, where it was possible to bypass denied SET DATABASE ACCESS privilege by leveraging ALTER DATABASE privilege instead.

Please refer to the changelog for full details of the changes.

Neo4j 5.3 (15 Dec 2022)

Highlights

Products included

• APOC Core 5.3.0 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is  fully supported (included in Labs directory). Please refer to the changelog for details.
• Bloom 2.5.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Requires a License)
• Browser 2.5.3 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.2.6 is a connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a Licence. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.3.1 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Improve messaging in Browser when newly created databases startup. 
• Browser is able to connect to members in an Autonomous Cluster even when they do not host a default database.

Language and Graph Model

• A faster implementation of the shortest path algorithm. 
• Extend subquery support in Exists and Count expressions to allow full non-updating subqueries. 

Write and Import Performance

• Multiple :ID columns can be specified in the admin import CSV header to form composite IDs referable from the relationship CSV data.

Read and Export Performance

• Introduce NodeByElementIdSeek, DirectedRelationshipByElementIdSeek and UndirectedRelationshipByElementIdSeek for logical plans to improve searches with ElementID.

Scale and Availability

• Quarantine user databases if recovery fails at startup. A quarantined state will indicate that something is wrong with the store and that manual intervention is required.
• Routing procedure returns all servers which host the given database as routers, including secondaries too.

Cloud Native Operations

• Docker image will fail to start if the specified password length is less than dbms.security.auth_minimum_password_length. The cause will not be visible on console output, but will be logged.

Operability & Observability

• SHOW DATABASES displays roles (primary/secondary) for stopped databases.
• SHOW DATABASES returns databases from offline servers within Autonomous Clusters.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.3 is supported please follow the migration guide available here.
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.1 to 5.3, with future support to 5.x+n.

Security 

• Password length requirement for creating and alter users. Default 8 characters but can be modified by using configuration setting dbms.security.auth_minimum_password_length
• Validate that URIs used for communicating with OpenId Connect identity providers use the HTTPS scheme. This is required by the specification, connecting to identity providers over HTTP is no longer supported – customers will no longer be able to connect.

Fixes

• Browser
  • Fix sysinfo dependency on a setting removed in Neo4j 5.0.
  • Fix northwind data not loading properly due to https redirect.
• Clustering
  • Fixed leak of drivers and connection pools with server side routing.
• Cypher
  • Fix plan value hash joins when the properties are wrapped in a function call.
  • Fix error Exception closing multiple resources when plans use Expand(Into).
  • Fixed a bug where an updating query might get stuck in an infinite loop during planning.
  • Fix issue where a high frequency of ALTER ALIAS would create a large number of threads.
• Fabric
  • Fix issue where temporal functions failed to run directly on composite databases.
• Kernel
  • Fixed a bug where neo4j-admin database import incremental would both miss enforcing uniqueness of node key constraints and leave them in an inconsistent state after the import. 
  • Fixed a bug where neo4j-admin database import incremental could cause indexes to contain nodes/relationships that violated property existence constraints in them even though these nodes/relationships never made it into the imported data.

Neo4j 5.2 (21 Nov 2022)

Highlights

Products included

• APOC 5.2.1 – The most popular community library developed for the database, is  fully supported (included in Labs directory).
• Bloom 2.5.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Requires a License)
• Browser 5.0.0 – Neo4j Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions (included in the /libs directory) of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.2.4 is a connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes for further details. (GDS Enterprise requires a License. )
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.2.2 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Now includes support for Neo4j’s any-to-any upgrade. Please refer to the release notes for details. (Included in Enterprise).

Language and Graph Model

• graph.propertiesByName() retrieves properties from graphs in a COMPOSITE database
• Deprecated the same relationship variable for multiple variable length relationships e.g. MATCH ()-[r*]->(), ()-[r*]->() and will be removed in a future version.

Write and Import Performance 

• New default value 70% of heap for ‘dbms.memory.transaction.total.max’ to reduce the likelihood of memory intensive transactions from running out of memory.

Read and Export Performance

• Added new types to org.neo4j.graphdb.schema.ConstraintType in the Core API.

Scale and Availability

• DRYRUN explains what the outcome of command will be on a cluster – without executing it.
• Created ‘synonyms’ cluster.raft. and cluster.storecopy for the metrics cluster.core.cluster.readreplica.

• Helm Charts for Neo4j 5 support Autonomous Clustering, and automatically deploy the network load balancer in the Kubernetes Cluster.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.2 is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.2, with future support to 5.x+n.
• Packaging information file provided under neo4j home.
• Upgraded Apache Shiro (included) from 1.9.1 to 1.10.0.

Fixes

• Composite / Fabric
  • Fix bug with map projection in Fabric, where the value of the map projection is returned outside a subquery.
• Autonomous Clustering
  • Fix bug where store copy failed to retry against certain remote servers due to issues with address locking logic.
  • Bug fix where a member in a two member raft group couldn’t be drained since it was wrongly considered unsafe.
  • Bug fix where the wrong artifact was chosen for databases with the same name but different database ids.
• Cypher
  • Fixed a bug in pipelined execution graph construction, that could cause some queries with UNION inside an updating subquery to fail with the message “Could not find downstream argumentStateBuffer with id ArgumentStateMapId(x).”
  • Fix bug in Expand(Into) where we could fail to find existing relationships if the same node is expanded multiple times.
  • Fix a bug where pressing ctrl+c in Cypher Shell would leave you in an infinite loop of IOException: Input/Output error errors.
• Kernel
  • Fix edge case where active transactions metrics were inconsistently decremented on closing a transaction, which led to <prefix>.database.transaction.active_read to potentially appear negative.
  • Fixed possible crashes when using very small page cache sizes.
• Security
  • Bump commons-text 1.9 -> 1.10.0 so as to address CVE-2022-42889

Neo4j 5.1 (24 October 2022)

Highlights

Products included

• Bloom 2.4.1 – A beautiful and expressive data visualization tool to quickly explore and interact with Neo4j’s graph data platform – no coding required. Please refer to the release notes for more details of what is available in this release.  (Requires a License)
• Neo4j Browser 5.0.0 – Browser is a tool for developers to interact with the graph. It is the default interface for both Enterprise and Community Editions of the Neo4j database. 
• Neo4j Graph Data Science 2.2.2 is a connected data analytics and machine learning platform that helps you understand the connections in big data to answer critical questions and improve predictions. Please refer to the release notes  for more details of what is available in this release. (GDS Enterprise requires a License)
• Neo4j Ops Manager 1.2 is a UI-based tool that enables Administrators to operate and observe all of their Neo4j Database Management Servers. Please refer to the release notes  for more details of what is available in this release. (Included in Enterprise).

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists 

• Improved messaging in Browser for startup of newly created databases
• Browser support connecting to cluster members without a default database.
• Procedures can specify an analyzer for Full Text queries

Language and Graph Model

• Include Europe/Kyiv in the list of time zones in Cypher to, as per IANA 2020b.

Write and Import Performance

• Incremental Import CSV header supports id-type to specify the value type for ID for a group e.g: id:ID(MyGroup){label:MyLabel, id-type: int}.

Read and Export Performance

• Trigram Analyzer provides significantly faster Full Text searches.
• Range seek Index Searches are consistent with non-Indexed range searches – does not match Not a Number (NaN).

Scale and Availability

• Autonomous Clusters support Server Side Routing for Reads
• Set or update the TOPOLOGY without specifying PRIMARY so that you can keep the defaults or existing settings.
• Default database is created and allocated on a best-effort basis to initial members during dbms creation.

Platform & Supportability

• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5.1 is supported please follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience and supports from 5.0 to 5.1, with future support to 5.x+n.

Fixes

• APIs
  • Fixes a memory leak issue when using the Transactional HTTP API (GitHub ref)
• Browser
  • Fix sysinfo depending on a setting no longer in 5.0.
  • Fix northwind data not loading properly due to https redirect.
• Autonomous Clustering
  • Fix deadlock in RaftDrainingService area
• Cypher
  • Fix issue where performance regressed for queries with “impossible predicates”
  • Fix bug where a user could change the database topology with incorrect privileges.
  • Fix bug in pipelined runtime where some queries using assertingMultiNodeIndexSeekOperator would fail incorrectly with Merge did not find a matching node…. For example in queries like UNWIND [0,1] AS id MERGE (n:A:B {id: id}), if there is a uniqueness constraint on the id property for both A and B labels.
  • Fix bug in pipelined runtime where AssertingMultiNodeIndexSeekOperator failed to perform locking index seeks. This could lead to failures when running concurrent transactions in queries like MERGE (n:A:B {id: x}) when we have a uniqueness constraint on id for both labels A and B.
  • Fixed bug where DROP DATABASE … IF EXISTS and ALTER DATABASE … IF EXISTS … could give DatabaseNotFoundException when there exists a remote database alias with the name.
  • Fixed bug for having * and order by id in same RETURN clause
  • Fix a bug where SHOW DATABASES may not include all servers for a database if the servers have the same value for server.bolt.advertised_address
  • Fix a bug with memory tracking in CALL IN TRANSACTION that could lead to an exception with the message “Expected non-negative long value …”.
  • Fix bug where columns could be swapped for UNION queries.
  • Fix a bug in pipelined runtime that can cause incorrect row ordering in queries that leverage order and contain an aggregation.
• Kernel
  • Fixes a bug that caused XML logging files not to be included in neo4j-admin server report

Neo4j 5.0 (06 October 2022)

Highlights

Surface for Developers and Data Scientists

• Browser 5.0 is a tool for developers to interact with the graph, and includes the following new features
  • Zoom to cursor on scroll in visualization
  • Zoom graph to fit after initial visualization animation
  • Editor displays full database name
  • Clear credentials in connection form on disconnect
  • Update :help articles on INDEX & CONSTRAINT
  • Note The Version and Info report the version as 5.0.0 but the Jar is named neo4j-browser-4.4.7.jar
• Exceptions and Errors provide is_retryable() property, which indicates whether a retry behavior is recommended for the exception.
• asyncio Python functions have been added to the Python Driver, including cancellation.
• Python driver supports Pandas dataframes export Neo4j result sets to integrate into common workflows for data scientists.
• Query String and Parameters in the results objects in the Go driver have been renamed, replacing the inconsistent ‘Statement’ object with the consistent ‘Query’ object.
• New unique (reused) element ID can be used by applications, including those deployed with Fabric, to identify graph elements, their type and the database it originates from especially. The identifier is available using the elementID() function in Cypher – and the id will be reused when a graph element is deleted. 
• Notifications -Updates severity on some of the existing notifications. Also, updates status code accordingly (removing Warning from the name if it now has severity Information). 
• Traversal Framework for Neo4j 5 is available and the documentation has been improved to provide clear guidance on  use and limitations.REMOVAL of the deprecated version and version_info of the Result Summary object.
• REMOVAL of the deprecated Session#reset in the Java driver.
• REMOVAL of deprecated HTTP API endpoints where the endpoint begins with /db/data/transaction/. Please use the endpoints that include the database name (e.g. /db/neo4j/tx/commit.

Language and Graph Model

• Graph Pattern Matching has been improved:
  • New inline Relationship patterns: MATCH (a)-[r:R WHERE r.p >10]-(b)
  • Improved label expressions in MATCH clauses. Nodes and relationships can be filtered using more sophisticated label and type boolean expressions such as & for logical AND (V:L1&L2), | for logical OR (V:L1|L2), ! for negation (V:!L4), % for any (V:%) and () for grouping (V:(L1&L2)|(L3& !L4)).
  • Allow reference to variables in other path elements:
    • MATCH (a)-[r:R WHERE r.p > b.p + a.p]-(b)
    • MATCH (a WHERE b.prop > 100)-[r]-(b)
• Additions to Cypher
  • Allow underscores in numeric literals, except at the start.
  • COUNT { .. } expression replaces size().
  • EXISTS {} can be used in all expressions.
  • isNan function returns whether a value is or is not a number.
• Neo4j APOC 5 Library (available in /labs directory) is the most-widely used extension library for Neo4j. It includes procedures, providing functionality for utilities, conversions, graph updates, and more. Comes with Engineering support for security and severity 1 fixes. APOC Extended has been moved to a community supported repository.
• REMOVAL of the deprecated BTREE index type.
• REMOVAL of the deprecated CYPHER 3.5 mode
• Cypher Deprecations, additions & removals: full details are available here.

Read and Export Performance 

• RANGE and POINT indexes can be used to speed up MATCH queries.
• Removed support for BTREE Indexes – before migrating from Neo4j 4.4, ensure you have migrated to the new RANGE and POINT Index types and deleted the BTREE indexes (refer to the Migration Guide for details).
• Lists included in FULLTEXT indexes – strings and arrays of strings are included in Full Text Indexes.
• Faster K-Hop Queries a new Cypher runtime operator (BSFPruningVarExpand) speeds up K-Hop queries.
• Auto-parameterize partially parameterized queries to improve query performance.
• SLOTTED Runtime in Community Edition replaces INTERPRETED and significantly improves query performance.

Write and Import Performance

• Incremental Offline Import appends new nodes with properties and new relationships between existing or new nodes within an existing database at an equivalent speed to Offline Import.
• PIPELINED Runtime support for write operations subqueries (CALL { })  that perform write operations can now be run on the faster PIPELINED runtime.
• No Eager for DETACH DELETE (n) in CALL IN TRANSACTIONS – the planner performs memory efficient deletes for full database deletions by avoiding planning eager operations.

Scale and Availability 

• Autonomous Clustering (Enterprise) provides
  • Autonomous Clustering offer horizontal elastic scale to run larger clusters, with more databases without administrative overhead. 
  • Administrators can specify the number of database copies to be replicated within a cluster so that they are available on a subset of servers.
  • The cluster decides which databases are allocated to which servers. The allocation may change as servers are added and removed over time. 
• Cypher’s COMPOSITE DATABASE provides real time Fabric configuration (Enterprise) – create, update and remove Fabric configurations without a restart, whether the database is within the same Autonomous Cluster, or hosted remotely. 
• Removed the Multi-DC license setting (Enterprise).

Cloud Native Operations

• IMMUTABLE privilege command (Enterprise) enables Administrators to lockdown the database to restrict administer privileges. 
• Server-Side Routing is enabled by default  (Enterprise).

Operability & Observability

• Neo4j-admin all admin functionalities have been consolidated into a single tool, and all commands have been grouped by scope.  There is an optional neo4j-admin conf file and individual conf files for each command so that there is more control over values provided for each command. 
• New namespaces for configuration settings in neo4j.conf clear and consistent use of namespaces to ensure settings are applied appropriately at the database or database management level.
• Procedures for validating config settings: The procedure ListConfig returns additional information about configuration settings. New procedure CheckConfigValue performs dry-run validation of new setting values.
• Cypher-shell provides auto completion of commands.
• Cypher-shell read access when there is no leader (Enterprise) read operations may be performed via cypher-shell using the neo4j:// scheme even when the cluster has no leader. Writes will return an error. 
• Cypher-shell environment variables for URI or address use either NEO4J_URI and a new parameter –uri or NEO4J_ADDRESS to match the existing parameter –address.
• CREATE DATABASE FROM URI enables Administrators to create a database by restoring from a backup on remote storage (HTTP, HTTPS, S3.)
• New backup subsystem (Enterprise) provides 
  • Full and differential backup to an immutable file, and aggregation to compile a chain of backups into a full backup. 
  • Differential backup reduces storage requirements by 85% and provides point-in-time restore on timestamps or transaction ids. 
  • A new backup API for backup management and operability and target multiple URIs in a single backup command to support Autonomous Clusters. 
  • The Backup subsystem from Neo4j 4x is available as neo4j-admin database legacy-backup and legacy-restore. 
• Strict validation for configuration settings by default to ensure the servers do not attempt to start with incorrect configuration (server.config.strict_validation.enabled). Turn off strict validation to enable start up, and log warnings.
• New namespaces for Metrics (Enterprise) consistent with the Database or Database Management Server 
• Neo4j.log has log rotation enabled by default – defaults are max file size is 20 MBytes (SizeBasedTriggeringPolicy), max number of log files is 7 (DefaultRolloverStrategy)
• All logging is controlled by log4j, including neo4j.log, configuration settings are located in the $NEO4J_HOME/conf folder in the user-logs.xml used for neo4j.log and server-logs.xml used for debug, security, http and query log. Query log uses the same format as neo4j.log
• Order transaction log files by creation time in debug.log and not alphabetical sorting.
• Destination database name is included in the debug.log when the neo4j-admin database import command is used.
• Transaction metadata included in Cypher-shell queries so that logs record the source of the query.
• Cypher-shell logging (-log) Support can use cypher-shell to replicate problems with the Java Driver or Bolt without having to edit the client application. 

Security

• Cypher-shell impersonation (Enterprise) use and or test user impersonation via Cypher-shell 

Platform & Supportability

• Requires Scala 2.13 (included) and Java JDK 17  – full details of System Requirements are available here.
• New Support Terms – Refer to Support Terms for full details – in summary
  • The Major release is supported with Hotfixes only until the first Minor release, each Minor release is supported with Hotfixes until the next Minor release. 
  • Hotfixes will only be released between Minor releases in exceptional cases, e.g. High Severity Security fix, and will receive product support until the next Minor release. 
  • In order to maintain Product Support for new bug fixes and feature enhancements, customers must apply the latest Minor release.
• Migration from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5 In order to migrate from Neo4j 4.4.x to Neo4j 5 follow the migration guide available here. 
• Any-to-any version rolling upgrade provides a streamlined upgrade experience from 5.0 onwards; upgrade is possible from any 5.x version to any later version of 5.y e.g. 5.2 to 5.6.
• Log acceptance of the enterprise agreement in neo4j.log
• Transaction state memory allocation configured to use ON_HEAP tx state by default as this benefits most workloads observed in Aura. 
• Consistent write throughput with Corretto JVM on AWS Graviton 2 performance investigation demonstrated a consistent write throughput vs Oracle JVM on the AWS Graviton 2, and Intel architectures.