There's a new version of Neo4j with improvements to its query performance, and the addition of support for autonomous clusters.  The Community Edition has received particular attention and the Neo4j team says it now offers 30 percent faster reads.

Neo4j database is one of the most popular graph databases. It stores data and relationships in graph structures, and is highly scalable. Developers can build intelligent applications that traverse s large, interconnected datasets in real time. It has a native graph storage and processing engine, and a graphical query language.

The first improvement to the new release is support for autonomous clustering. Since version 3, organizations have been able to use Neo4j to run multiple Neo4j databases and scale them out to handle tens of thousands queries per second. This release takes away the need to manage the clustering. All an administrator needs to do is declare how many primary or secondary copies are needed and how those copies should be managed in the cluster, and Neo4j’s Cypher handles the details. It automatically handles the placement of primary and secondary copies to the most optimal server in the cluster.

The next improvement is support for multi-cluster Fabric graphs. Fabric graphs are a composite graph of other graph databases or shards, and Neo4j 5 lets you use Fabric in an autonomous cluster to execute queries across databases in a cluster without the need for separate Fabric proxies.

The developers say that this release also offers faster K-Hop queries. K-Hop is a type of deep query that involves a large and variable number of hops where K is the number of hops. The aim is to find all unique nodes, typically in combination with aggregation functions to count properties. In Neo4j 5, this type of query has been optimized to go breadth first. The developers say this has resulted in "blazingly fast response times; for example, the response time for 8-hop queries has been improved by 1000 times".

The final improvement of note is a faster runtime for the Community Edition of Neo4j. The runtime component has been upgraded from Interpreted to slotted, which has resulted in Community Edition providing reads that are around thirty percent faster.

Neo4j 5 is available now. 

More Information

Neo4j Homepage

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