First up, congratulations to Neo Technology, especially the engineering team, for releasing Neo4j 2.2!
A lot of you have been asking when it’s going to be possible to try out the recently released Neo4j 2.2 on GrapheneDB. That’s why we’re happy to announce that you can now upgrade your GrapheneDB deployments to Neo4j 2.2.
As a major new version with plenty of new features, we don’t suggest you go straight into production with it.
What we do recommend at this point is that you begin testing with a new Neo4j 2.2 deployment to ensure that you don’t run into any unexpected issues. As with other releases that include store-migrations, the version upgrade will be non-reversible, so proceed with caution.
We will be tracking and iterating updates to Neo4j 2.2.x as they are released.
Also, we recommend to upgrading to Neo4j 2.1 before embarking on the 2.2 update.
Try Neo4j 2.2 on GrapheneDB for free!
Noteworthy changes
Users are reporting performance improvements of 20% and higher without any changes in code or queries.
Here’s a short summary of what to expect when upgrading:
- A major overhaul of the Neo4j Browser, including the ability to visualize query plans and terminate running queries!
- Fast-write buffering which dramatically increases the throughput of many write workloads.
- A new pagecache, which is faster and easier to configure. If you’ve struggled to configure your Neo4j memory caches before, you’ll love this one!
- Full support for profiling and explaining Cypher query plans, including a query plan visualizer in the Neo4j Browser.
- A new cost based query planner for Cypher, which is smarter at planning queries, in addition to the existing rule based compiler. Neo4j will be smart and will automatically figure out which to use for each query.
For the full list of changes, please look at the release notes for Neo4j 2.2.