The Future of Graph Databases Is Here: Introducing Neo4j 4.0

Graph Market Leader Delivers the Definitive Foundation for Connected Data, Built for Unlimited Scale and Developer Flexibility

SAN MATEO, Calif.– February 4th, 2020 – Neo4j, the leader in graph technology, announced today the general availability of Neo4j 4.0, the most significant product release in the graph technology market to date.

The 4.0 release of the Neo4j graph database addresses the broad and complex challenges of application development in the decade to come, including unlimited scalability, intelligent data context and robust enterprise-grade security. Enterprise organizations are already using Neo4j 4.0 to build intelligent applications that leverage the increasingly dynamic, interconnected nature of data.

[Caption: Neo4j 4.0 addresses the broad and complex challenges of modern application development, including unlimited scalability, intelligent data context and robust enterprise-grade security.]

Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j, explained how businesses innovate using Neo4j 4.0 without having to negotiate trade-offs between performance, flexibility and maintenance.

“I believe Neo4j 4.0 will set the pace for all graph database technology in the next decade and beyond," Eifrem said. "With Neo4j 4.0, we made a massive, audacious engineering investment to raise the bar on the scale, performance and security that can be expected from a graph database – and from databases in general. Our customers challenge us with new use cases for graph technology which require unlimited scale, as well as development and deployment flexibility, all while maintaining security and privacy. These are hard problems to address, but Neo4j 4.0 is already delivering on this promise.”

Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst at RedMonk, shared his observations on modern application development.

“The modern application development process puts a premium on velocity, which is why ease of use and flexibility for developers have become as critical as performance for database platforms,” O’Grady said. “One of the ways this is achieved is by avoiding the need for cumbersome data abstractions to translate between business needs and relational schemas. Graph databases are a canonical example of this, and Neo4j remains one of the pioneers of the category committed to bringing the benefits of graphs to a wide variety of customer types and use cases.”

Emerging Requirements for Intelligent Applications

Connected data has emerged as a key consideration for modern application development – whether organizations require well-tuned heuristics, advanced analytics or machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Neo4j 4.0 addresses the broad and complex concerns of today’s intelligent applications, including:

Unlimited scalability: Data grows relentlessly and performant applications can’t be constrained by data volumes. Applications need to scale up – and out – to handle higher volumes while maintaining performance across a growing diversity of on-premises, hybrid and cloud architectures.

Dynamic, revealed context: Applications increasingly need databases that adapt to the myriad complexities, dynamics and unpredictability of real-world data. Effective applications use the richness of data relationships to reveal context and causality in real time.

Security and data privacy: As regulations continue to evolve, individuals and governments are more conscious than ever about how and where consumer and citizen data is used. Application developers will need to build applications that meet these needs securely and rapidly.

Intelligence and learning: Operational applications are increasingly likely to be components of complex systems that incorporate machine learning and AI. For actionable AI, tomorrow’s applications need to bridge data science across operational systems and leverage context in real time.

Neo4j 4.0 at a Glance

Key highlights of the 4.0 release of the Neo4j graph database include:

Sharding and federation: Neo4j 4.0 now allows for horizontal scaling. Organizations with the most extreme scaling needs now benefit from Neo4j’s minutes-to-milliseconds performance advantage over relational and NoSQL databases, untethered by data volumes.

Reactive architecture: Reactive systems are defined as being responsive, resilient, elastic and message-driven to deliver maximum scalability and performance. Neo4j 4.0 empowers reactive-oriented developers, providing them with full control over how their applications interact with the database, including robust data pipelines, streaming data, machine learning and more.

Deployment flexibility: Neo4j 4.0 adds full multi-database capabilities with separation of data, allowing multiple databases to be run inside a single Neo4j cluster. This provides significant operational efficiency, security and agility for B2B SaaS multi-tenancy, development convenience and regulatory compliance.

Granular security: With Neo4j 4.0, developers and administrators now have fine control over access to data for security and privacy purposes. These granular security controls ensure that only the appropriate users have access to sensitive data, opening up potential new graph use cases in areas that can include sensitive information, such as medical research.

Support for the Neo4j 4.0 Release

More than 75% of Fortune 100 companies are using Neo4j to help them leverage the context and intelligence inherent in their data. Several of those companies are already using Neo4j 4.0 to solve their toughest data challenges.

albelli is one of the largest European photo book suppliers. With over a million users, the company uses Neo4j to handle massive volumes of photo and event data. Josh Marcus, Chief Technology Officer at albelli explained the reasons why he has been anticipating Neo4j 4.0.

“At albelli we regularly deal with petabytes of data and we are most excited about the new scalability features in Neo4j 4.0,” said Marcus. “The ability to horizontally scale with the new sharding and federation features, alongside Neo4j’s optimal scale-up architecture will enable us to grow our graph database without barriers. Neo4j factored our requirements into their latest release – a mark of a great vendor and a graph database designed for the future.”

Michal Bachman, CEO of GraphAware, shared his thoughts on the 4.0 release of Neo4j.

“The unmatched scalability of Neo4j 4.0 lends itself to emerging AI and machine learning use cases, which require graphs to scale reliably across massive datasets to give learning applications context and make AI more explainable,” said Bachman. “In addition, the ability to apply fine-grained security on nodes and relationships in a flexible way will have immediate impact across a broad range of use cases.”

For More Information

More information about Neo4j 4.0 is available here. Read more about the Neo4j 4.0 release in this blog post.

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About Neo4j

Neo4j is the leading graph database technology that drives innovation and competitive advantage at Airbus, Comcast, eBay, NASA, UBS, Walmart and more. Thousands of community deployments and more than 400 customers harness connected data with Neo4j to reveal how people, processes, locations and systems are interrelated. Using this relationships-first approach, applications built using Neo4j tackle connected data challenges including artificial intelligence, fraud detection, real-time recommendations and master data. Find out more at neo4j.com.

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