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InfoQ Homepage News Graph Database Neo4j Updates Licensing and Enhances Usability

Graph Database Neo4j Updates Licensing and Enhances Usability

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Neo Technology has released version 1.3 GA (General Availability) of Neo4j, a graph-style database.

In creating this new version, the Neo4j team had two goals in mind. The first was a change in licensing. The Community version of Neo4j is now licensed under GNU General Public License (GPLv3). The Advanced and Enterprise editions are available under GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3) or commercial licensing. Neo Technology Chief Scientist Jim Webber says the new licensing will allow open access to the community edition.

We believe that graphs are very broadly applicable to an awful lot of computing domains, and yet nobody (including us) has up until this point made graph databases universally free to use and tinker with. We think that's incredibly important since it completely opens up the whole field of graph databases to commercial organizations, researchers, students, and tinkerers and hackers.

According to Webber, the second goal was creating a more developer- and dev-ops-friendly product.

The second theme we had for our 1.3 release was to make the database friendlier (and that's a theme that will continue in future releases). Although the graphistas can naturally think in graphs, we understand that for folks coming from a relational or KV/document background, the simplicity and expressiveness of graphs can (ironically) take a bit of getting used to. I think of it as the injury that lingers once you've taken off the handcuffs.

Some highlights of the Neo4j 1.3 release:

  • Each database can now contain 32 billion nodes or relationships and up to 64 billion properties.
  • Reduction of the database footprint by implementing a new strategy for common short strings
  • The WebAdmin tool for exploring graphical relationships has been revamped
  • Faster searches using Dijkstra’s algorithm to find the shortest path between nodes
  • Updates to indexing API and underlying implementations
  • Enhancements to the REST API

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