Neo4j News

Neo4j 1.2 Milestone 5 - Reference Manual and HA!

2010-12-02T11:23:00.011+01:00

Peter Neubauer

Hi there,
in this release, the community and the Neo4j team have been working hard to bring you some really long-term value in the Neo4j project, mainly Documentation and the first glimpse of the High Availability component.

Thanks to all individuals reporting bugs, feedback and patches, a couple of them got into this release, like for instance:

Minor Neo4j server script enhancements from Mao Pu
REST API feedback form Rick Bullotta, Max De Marci and many others
Much feedback on visualization options for graphs from the community

Documentation

Neo4j now has the beginnings of a one-stop reference manual as both online HTML and PDF, giving you reference documentation on using Neo4j and the related components. We hope this will make it much easier to find relevant information, getting started and look up things that previously have been spread over the wiki, blog posts and other different online sources. This documentation is available online at http://docs.neo4j.org/ .
This is work in progress, but please get back to us with feedback on what you want to see more of, things that might be missing and other comments!

Also, this documentation will be versioned, so that for each Neo4j release there will be a corresponding version of the Neo4j Reference Manual. Eventually, we hope to evolve this into a book on Neo4j. If you want to contribute to the effort, let us know!

High Availability

With this milestone, we are proud to for the first time release a version of the Highly Available Neo4j cluster to the community. This component turns Neo4j into a system with a Write-Master and a number of Read-Slaves. Upon mutating operations, at least the master and one slave are committing the transaction before propagating out the changes to the other slaves. In case of the write-master failing, the remaining slaves will automatically elect a new master. Also, the whole cluster infrastructure is transparent to the code that uses the Neo4j API, so that all slaves and masters can be written to and read from transparently. Your code does not need to be aware of the type of HA setup it is running on. Simply do

GraphDatabaseService db = new HighlyAvailableGraphDatabase( path, config );

and off you go as usual!
More on that to come as part of the documentation, but feel free to get it going and give it a spin.

As always, to get the release, download it from http://neo4j.org/ or update your pom.xml to


<dependency>
  <groupId>org.neo4j</groupId>
  <artifactId>neo4j</artifactId>
  <version>1.2.M05</version>
</dependency>

May the source be with you!

/peter

Neo4j 1.2 Milestone 3 - Habit Forming

2010-11-05T15:58:00.001+01:00

The first time is a promise. The second, a confirmation. But it's not until the third time you follow through on cleaning your room that you can claim it as a habit.

We're feeling good about having a milestone release habit. Regular releases keep us mindful of always working towards delivering something useful. Milestone 3 has been quality-assured to minor API changes, bug fixes and some repackaging.

Get it from the download site. And read about the changes here.

Oh, and a reminder for anyone in the glorious Øresund region: look for Neo4j team members at Øredev next week.

Cheers,

Andreas

Neo4j at Öredev and Oredev Open, Nov 8-12, Malmö, Sweden

2010-10-26T06:36:00.004+02:00

Peter Neubauer

Hi all,
the Neo4j team is very excited to announce some Neo4j Team members being present at this years Öredev. Jim Webber is talking about REST in Practice, and Emil Eifrem is introducing the new Spring Data && NoSQLcomponents, with Neo4j being the first fully supported backend.

Also, there is the Öredev Open event on November 11. where MongoDB and Neo4j will contribute to the NoSQL track. Come, join and share - Malmö is always worth a visit in November :)

Cheers,

Your Neo4j team.

Neo4j 1.2.M02 is out

2010-10-21T16:25:00.004+02:00

In following our new bi-weekly release schedule, we today have released version 1.2.M02 of Neo4j. It's been a productive couple of weeks, and the biggest change for our users is the new integrated index API, with Lucene as the default implementation.

Update your maven pom dependencies to:


<project>
...
<dependencies>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.neo4j</groupId>
  <artifactId>neo4j</artifactId>
  <version>1.2.M02</version>
  <type>pom</type>
</dependency>
...
</dependencies>
...
</project>

More links:

Download here
Read more here
Get started here

Happy hacking

Andrés

Neo4j 1.2 Milestone 1 released

2010-10-12T12:07:00.007+02:00

Peter Neubauer

The Neo4j team is pleased to announce the first milestone towards the 1.2 release of Neo4j -- 1.2.M01 being the version number. Our current focus is on usability, which means improving the overall experience of getting, installing, and using Neo4j. We're starting with:

a bi-weekly release schedule, for quick introduction of new features
deploying artifacts to maven central, for hassle-free distribution
new ways of gathering feedback, so we can figure out what works

Download here -- http://neo4j.org/get?file=neo4j-1.2.M01.zip

Depend on it here -- http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/

Get started here -- http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Getting_Started_With_Neo4j

Cheers,

Your Neo4j team.

Neo4j visualization with Gephi

2010-08-17T11:00:00.010+02:00

During the summer Martin Škurla has developed support for the Neo4j graph database in the Gephi visualization and exploration platform. This Google Summer of Code project is now approaching its finish.

The basic idea of the project is twofold:

Users of Neo4j get better visualization support
Users of Gephi can work with larger graphs

The graph visualization can give you output like this:

Martin just published an article summarizing the project, head over and read it! For the future development of the Neo4j plugin, there's a survey where everyone has the chance to give feedback on what features they want to use.

To try it out, download NetBeans 6.9 and use it to build and execute the source code (Gephi depends on the NetBeans platform version 6.9). To check out the source, make sure to have Bazaar installed, and then do:

bzr checkout lp:~bujacik/gephi/support-for-neo4j

Finally, you're welcome to discuss the plugin on the Neo4j mailing list and in the Gephi forums.

Update: See the comments for information on configuring NetBeans to build Gephi!

NOSQL summer in Malmö!

2010-06-03T13:09:00.003+02:00

Hi all,
the summer is finally here, and with it soooo much spare time. Why not meet up with some peeps and discuss some of the cool new paradigms of database technology popping up in the NOSQL space?

Tim Anglade has been taking up the flag and is pulling off the NOSQL summer. If you are up for some cool discussions, join one of the places! NeoTechnology is providing space and beer for a first meetup 16th of June in Malmö. We are starting off the the Amazon Dynamo paper, a classic in new data thinking. If you are in Sweden or Denmark, ping us on the list and come along!

Neo4j Standalone REST server 0.8 available

2010-04-15T14:07:00.007+02:00

The Neo4j team is proud to announce the availability of a REST wrapper that can be installed both on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as a standalone server. Please follow the Getting Started guide on the Neo4j wiki where you'll find download links, the Matrix-REST example is available over here.

This makes the interaction with the Neo4j graph database from PHP, .NET and other languages like Perl a lot easier. Let us know how things work out via the Neo4j mailing list!

Google Summer of Code Projects with Neo4j

2010-03-25T15:46:00.007+01:00

Great news for all students wanting to spend the summer hacking on Neo4j and getting paid for it! The hackers behind Neo4j have teamed up with a few mentoring organizations on some interesting Summer of Code projects!

So far there are two proposed projects involving Neo4j, but more projects could be added in the next couple of days. You could of course also come up with a cool project on your own and propose it to one of the mentoring organizations.

The first project we have proposed is a collaboration with the uDIG project. This project is part of our greater effort of making Neo4j capable of being a fully featured spatial database. The sweet spots are complex spatial algorithms such as routing, spatial analytics and N-dimensional indexing. This summer of code project will aim at implementing the OpenGIS and GeoTools standard interfaces. This will make Neo4j a drop-in alternative to other GIS backends, such as PostGIS, MySQL Spatial and Oracle Spatial.

The second project we have proposed is a collaboration with the Gephi project. What we aim for here is to make Gephi able to visualize graphs straight out of a Neo4j graph (not just exporting data from Neo4j and importing it in Gephi). This will enable Gephi to work with larger graphs than today, which is a direct benefit for Gephi. It will also enable Gephi to be used as a visualization tool for Neo4j based applications, for introspection, data debugging and graphical reporting.

This will be a truly great summer for Neo4j and the lucky students who get selected for these projects. There's a lot of interest in both GIS and visualization in the Neo4j community, so we look forward to great discussions around these projects! Mark March 29 in your calendar and submit your proposal early!

Update on Neo4j Ruby bindings

2010-03-12T11:22:00.006+01:00

During 2010 there's been two releases of the Neo4j.rb JRuby bindings for the Neo4j graph database so far. Time to catch up with what's new!

Version 0.4.0 of Neo4j.rb came with improved traversal performance, more options on how to use relationships, for instance relationships can now be indexed. Version 0.4.1 gave us migrations and access to a batch inserter for big import-once data volumes.

In the last days of 2009, neo4jr-simple was first released. It's a simple ready to go wrapper for Neo4j and currently in version 0.2.1. Make sure to check out the neo4jr-social example application as well!

Great thanks to Andreas Ronge, Matthew Deiters and all the other contributors for the awesome stuff!

Neo4j 1.0 released

2010-02-23T14:57:00.007+01:00

Recently version 1.0 of Neo4j was released. There has been a Neo Technology news post regarding this event, as well as a blog post on how to get to know Neo4j. The distribution is available as binary and source packages from the downloads page.

For more information, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

A few pointers to stuff that happened around and after the release:

InfoWorld article: Databases primed for social networks
MyNoSQL blog: Get a Taste of Graph Databases: InfoGrid and Neo4j
A Neo4j plugin for Griffon has been created, with a sample application as well
Peter Neubauer on Neo4j - a graph database Chariot TechCast by Ken Rimple

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

Neo4j 1.0-b11 released: stability & robustness

2009-12-27T20:03:00.000+01:00

Neo4j 1.0-b11 — the open source nosql graph database — has been released. This is the last beta before we (after 6 years in commercial 24/7 production use) finally feel that we have a version that is worthy of 1.0. This means that the main focus of this release is stability and robustness rather than features. Having said that, Neo4j 1.0-b11 still includes amongst other things a new batch inserter version that implements the NeoService API (to minimize the impact of first-time imports on the rest of your code) and a lot of cleanup and improvements of the indexing utilities.

Download the Neo4j Core release or the Apoc bundle here.

For more information, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

Neo4j 1.0-b10 released: read-only mode & faster deep traversals

2009-11-03T00:39:00.004+01:00

Neo4j 1.0-b10 - the open source nosql graph database - has been released with new features including a read-only mode, improved depth first traversal speed due to an iterator implementation all the way down to the native store layer and faster recovery process when starting up after a crash. Download the Neo4j Core release or the Apoc bundle here.

For more information, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

NoSQL East & semweb meetup in DC

2009-10-12T09:33:00.002+02:00

Emil will represent Neo4j at two upcoming event: Emil and Tim Berners-Lee -- I'm sorry Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web -- will speak at the semantic web meetup in association with ISWC in Washington DC on Oct 27 2009.

After that, we're heading straight to nosql east where our commercial backer Neo Technology will sponsor the conference and Emil will give a Neo4j talk.

If you're attending either one or are just in the area, please ping us so we can grab a beer.

Initial release of Neo4j Grails plugin

2009-10-05T11:26:00.006+02:00

As announced by Stefan Armbruster on the Neo4j and Grails mailing lists, the initial 0.1 version of the Neo4j Grails plugin has been released by him. Read the full announcement in this blog post. Grails is a web application framwork based on the Groovy langauge. At the moment the plugin has support for the basic CRUD operations and also exposes the underlying node of each domain object through a property.

Different people have requested such a plugin previously, so it's exiting news that the plugin now exists.

Stefan has also provided example code for how to use the plugin. Basic domain classes may look like this:

class Author { 
    String name
    Date dob
    static hasMany = [ books: Book ]
}

class Book {
    String title
    static belongsTo = [ author:Author ]
}

After adding a little data to the domain the node space will look like this (click for bigger version):

Further information is found on the Neo4j wiki Grails page.

Neo4j at JAOO 2009 Oct 4 - 8

2009-10-04T23:51:00.005+02:00

Emil from the Neo4j crew is right now making the streets of Aarhus, Denmark, unsafe for RDBMS fans. Why? Because Oct 4th is kicking off the week of JAOO 2009!

Emil will give an introductory Neo4j talk in the morning slot of the first day. If you're attending and want a free beer or just discuss some #nosql or graph database goodness, please stop by and say hi!

Neo4j.rb 0.3.2 released

2009-09-28T09:06:00.007+02:00

Andreas Ronge, Martin Kleppmann and the other contributors have recently released Neo4j.rb 0.3.2. The project on GitHub now has thirteen forks. The release announcement was sent to the Neo4j Ruby group.

Major points from the changelog:

experimental support for aggregating nodes
traversal with traversal position
addition of the graph-algo AllSimplePaths algorithm
upgrade to Neo4j-b9 with a Neo4j.all_nodes method added

Neo4j 1.0-b9 released: batch insert mode & new adaptive cache

2009-08-17T16:27:00.000+02:00

Neo4j 1.0-b9 — the open source graph database — has been released with new features including a batch insert mode for bulk import, optimized read-only transactions and a new adaptive cache implementation. Download the Neo4j Core release or the Apoc bundle here.

For more information, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

Neo4j.rb 0.3.0 released - REST support included

2009-06-25T23:57:00.000+02:00

Andreas Ronge released a new versions of the JRuby library for Neo4j. The 0.3.0 release focuses on event handling, list support and lots of other things. The really big news this time is the REST API support contributed by Martin Kleppmann. For more information about this release read the full changelog. There's also documentation to read, and you can find out what's going on at the project page.

Convenient package Neo4j Apoc 0.1 released

2009-05-09T00:17:00.006+02:00

Today we released the first version of Neo4j Apoc. Apoc is an acronym for A Package Of Components and it bundles a handful of useful Neo4j components into a single download.

We created Apoc because we noticed that we always included the same set of initial components in our projects. Additionally, one of the most frequent questions we get on for example the user mailing list is 'how do you find a node by property value?' The answer is 'well, you use index-util, which you can download from the maven site.'

Now you don't have to. If you use Apoc, you already have index-util on your classpath as well as a component for remote access (remote-neo) and a command-line browser.

Feel free to check it out and please give us feedback as usual!

Neo4j 1.0-b8 released: online backup & improved performance

2009-05-03T23:52:00.011+02:00

Neo4j 1.0-b8 — the open source graph database — was released today with a major set of features including incremental online backup of running Neo4j instances, reduced memory footprint and lots of performance improvements. Download it here.

While this is officially a beta release, we've had later stage snapshots running in production for a couple of months on several production systems. Grab it fresh off the presses, read the list mail announcement and check out the details in the changelog.

As always, feedback to the mailing list, on Twitter or directly to us.

Neo4j at OSCON 2009

2009-04-19T01:56:00.005+02:00

In late July, the Neo4j team will attend OSCON -- the O'Reilly Open Source Conference! Emil will give a talk titled Neo4j - The Benefits Of Graph Databases. If you're in the area, please stop by and say hi!

First complete Neo4j sample app

2009-02-11T10:30:00.003+01:00

The IMDB example 1.0, a Neo4j-based web application using part of the IMDB actors/movies dataset, has been released. The application lets the user search for or browse through actors and movies. For actors, it also shows their Bacon path as well. Here's how it can look:

The application itself is accompanied by thorough instructions and explanations. This way you can learn how to model a domain using the graph database paradigm inherent to Neo4j. Other important points is organizing data for searches, finding paths and handling transactions.

One nice thing about Neo4j is its whiteboard friendliness. This is a sketch of the IMDB domain model ... no, wait, it's the implementation:

The application itself is based on Spring Framework and packaged using Maven 2.

For those who want to get started right away, here's a quick how-to (requiring mvn and svn to be already installed). Enter the following at the command line (all at once):

mkdir imdb && 
cd imdb && 
mvn scm:checkout -DconnectionUrl=scm:svn:https://svn.neo4j.org/examples/imdb/tags/1.0/ && 
cd target/checkout && 
mvn jetty:run

Then browse to http://localhost:8080/imdb/setup.html to load the data and use the application. Use ctrl-c in the same console to stop the application.

From the main page of the Neo4j IMDB example you will find your way to the location of downloadable zip files as well if that's what you prefer.

Neo4j.rb 0.2.0 released

2009-02-02T11:44:00.003+01:00

Andreas Ronge keeps releasing new versions of his JRuby library for Neo4j. The 0.2.0 release focuses on traversals and filtering. For more information about this release read the full changelog. There's also an introduction to read, and you can find out what's going on at the project page.

Neo4j.rb reached first milestone

2009-01-14T10:43:00.004+01:00

The JRuby bindings for Neo4j by Andreas Ronge has reached its first milestone with version 0.1.0. See the project page for more information. Highlights from the changelog: enhancements to properties, indexing with Date/DateTime, YARD documentation.

The bottom line is that it's time to try it out and give Andreas some feedback. You can follow the development and file issues over at the Lighthouse project page.