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Originally authored by Andres Taylor and Tobias Lindaaker
We are proud to release Neo4j 2.0.0-M05 this week. The 2.0 project is now in full-speed development after summer vacation. We’re getting close to feature completeness now, and we want to get this release out to you so you can give us refined feedback for the final release.
We are proud to release Neo4j 2.0.0-M05 this week. The 2.0 project is now in full-speed development after summer vacation. We’re getting close to feature completeness now, and we want to get this release out to you so you can give us refined feedback for the final release.
Unique Constraints
Neo4j values the agility and development speed you get from using a schema-free database. It makes it possible and easy to start prototyping and learning. There is a huge value in this. On the other hand, it’s really nice to be able to make the graph structure more strictly constrained as a project evolves towards production (a big theme in our Neo4j 2.x roadmap). We think the new
Optional schema gives you the best of both worlds.
A major step in this direction is the addition of unique constraints. This release includes fully-functional unique constraints which allow you to specify that a label/property combination must be unique in a database. Adding constraints make your database safer to work with and helps you catch problems you'd otherwise have to work hard to detect manually.
For example, by running this Cypher query, you’ll end up with a unique constraint on the Person label for the email property.
CREATE CONSTRAINT ON (n:Person) ASSERT n.email IS UNIQUE;
If you try to create two different nodes with the same email, you’ll get an error about it from the database:
CREATE (:Person {email: "dude@company.com"});
CypherExecutionException: Node 2 already exists with label Person and property "email"=[dude@company.com] In the engine room, unique constraints are implemented using a unique index. You can see this when looking at the schema, for example, using the shell:
neo4j-sh (?)$ schema Indexes ON :Person(email) ONLINE (for uniqueness constraint) Constraints ON (person:Person) ASSERT person.email IS UNIQUE
Except for the fact you can’t drop the index manually, it works like any other index and can be used for
read query execution as well as to check uniqueness.
Label Store
Milestone releases prior to this stored labels in the Node store. If this was meant to find all the nodes with the Person label on them, we would scan the whole node store and look at each node. In the Neo4j 2.0.0-M05 release, we now have a Label store where we persist this information, which makes it faster to find all nodes with a certain label on them.
You don’t need to do anything to make use of this new store. Cypher will automatically use it, and
GlobalGraphOperations.getAllNodesWithLabel(Label) will also use it. But don't be surprised when you see new files in your data/graph.db directory.
AutoClosable Transactions
Since Neo4j 2.0 is a Java 7 product, and we're trying to make sure that all resources are tied to a transaction, we’ve changed the age old Transaction interface so that it now implements
AutoClosable.
AutoClosable is the interface that allows you to write a
try statement and have an implicit
finally block that releases any
AutoClosable resources registered with the
try block.
This means you can now write to the Core API as follows:
try (Transaction tx = db.beginTransaction()){
// do stuff inside the transaction
tx.success();
}
This block will make sure the transaction is closed, even if an exception is thrown inside the
try block.
Removed a Lot of Deprecated Methods/Classes
Since we’re getting closer to a major release, it’s time to clean up our API a little. In this release, most of the things marked as deprecated in the 1.9 version have been removed, so now's a good time to think about moving any of your code that relies on deprecated methods over to the new APIs.
New Cypher Syntax
Cypher tries hard to work well with not only graphs, but also with collections. In this release, we took the liberty of updating the capabilities we have around collections.
We’ve had functions to do some of these things before, but the queries using them didn’t exactly roll off your tongue. Now we’re trying to make these features easier to use and read once you’ve used them.
For more information about ranges, literal maps and list comprehensions, you can read all about them here:
http://docs.neo4j.org/chunked/2.0.0-M05/syntax-collections.html
Minimalistic Cypher and JSON
After making the
START syntax optional owing to the expressiveness of
Labels and the new
Indexes, we are also making
WHERE and
MATCH optional if you don’t need variables at all. And you now can return
literal maps directly, making Cypher way more JSON-friendly.
RETURN { key : "Value", collectionKey: [ { inner: "Map1" }, { inner: "Map2" } ] } as JSON
Deprecated > /dev/null
We have now removed a number of deprecated APIs from Neo4j as announced at least 2 versions earlier. See the changelogs.
As always, we’ve done a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements. Here are the release notes. Also, a big thanks for all the good suggestions, discussions and error reports that have gone into this release. It makes a big difference!
Yours connectedly,
Andres Taylor and Tobias Lindaaker
As always, we’ve done a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements. Here are the release notes. Also, a big thanks for all the good suggestions, discussions and error reports that have gone into this release. It makes a big difference!
Yours connectedly,
Andres Taylor and Tobias Lindaaker
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