Original author: Andreas Kollegger from the Neo4j Blog

Available immediately, Neo4j 1.8 Milestone 7 sets the stage for responsible data sharing. We’re open source. Naturally we’re mindful about supporting...

Open (Meta) Data 

 Way back when Neo4j 1.2.M01 was released we introduced the Usage Data Collector (UDC), an optional component which would help us understand how running instance of Neo4j were being used, by reporting back anonymous context information: operating system, runtime, region of the Earth, that kind of thing.

Of course, the source code for the UDC is open and available for inspection. Now, we’re taking some steps to make the meta-data itself available, to make that data useful for everyone in the community, and to do so while being uber sensitive to the slightest hint of privacy concerns.

We’re kinda excited about this, actually. Stay tuned to learn more about what we’re doing, how you can be involved, and how it will be awesome for the community.

Create Unique Data 

Earlier in the 1.8 branch, we introduced the RELATE clause, a powerful blend of MATCH and CREATE. With it, you could insist that a pattern of data should exist in the graph, and RELATE would perform the least creations required to uniquely satisfy the pattern.

In discussion, we kept saying things like “uniquely creates” to describe it, finally realizing that we should name the thing with the much more obvious CREATE UNIQUE.

To upgrade to CREATE UNIQUE, just s/RELATE/CREATE UNIQUE/ like so:

START left=node(1), right=node(3,4)
RELATE left-[r:KNOWS]->right
RETURN r

… becomes...

START left=node(1), right=node(3,4)
CREATE UNIQUE left-[r:KNOWS]->right
RETURN r

Read more details about the clause over in the manual page on it.

Notable Changes 

Kernel:

•  Traversal framework backwards compatibility  
  • Cleaned up any breaking changes  
  • Removed Expander#addFilter 
• Kernel JMX bean instance identifier is now reused and can optionally be set explicitly via forced_kernel_id config setting 

 Server:

• Consoles in webadmin can now be disabled. 

Cypher:

• Added escape characters to string literals 
• Renamed `RELATE` to `CREATE UNIQUE` 

 UDC:

•  Added edition information (community, advanced, enterprise) 
• Added a cluster-name hash so that stores originating from the same cluster can be aggregated 
• Fixed release version and revision OS version, architecture, and release 
• Changed precedence of database configuration over internal udc configuration 
• Added distribution information (dpkg, rpm, unknown)