Release Date: 26 April 2016
Neo4j 3.0 is a landmark new release, delivering graph databases to the mainstream thanks to its massive scalability and new, developer-friendly properties. It is our most powerful and easy-to-use graph database yet.

Highlights


  • A new (optional) storage engine that does away with previous upper scaling limits while retaining Neo4j’s hallmark performance advantages. (Enterprise edition only feature)
  • Bolt, a new lightweight and efficient binary protocol designed for lightning-fast access to the graph
  • New official, in-house language drivers for Java, .NET, JavaScript and Python
  • New cost-based query optimizer for writes, as well as improvements to Cypher performance throughout, producing better, faster queries across the board
  • Neo4j Browser now includes Neo4j Browser Sync, a companion cloud service for saving scripts and graph style sheets
  • Finally, a new configuration and logging structure to easily support modern deployment scenarios, making it easy to run Neo4j anywhere

Detailed Changes


For the complete list of all changes, please see the changelog.

Known Issues


  • Users migrating their config entirely by hand, without using provided migrator tool, the obsolete setting dbms.querylog.filename must not be present in the neo4j.conf or Neo4j will not start
  • Java 8 is not included in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will have to be installed manually prior to installing or upgrading to 3.0.
  • Custom procedures cannot be loaded in Neo4j Desktop.
  • Query termination via the Bolt protocol does not work.
  • The settings to control GC logging (dbms.logs.gc.*) do not have any effect on Windows. On Windows GC logging can be configured by explicitly specifying JVM arguments using the setting dbms.jvm.additional in neo4j-wrapper.conf.

Upgrading


When upgrading to Neo4j 3.0 for the first time, be sure to read the current upgrade instructions in the Neo4j Operations Manual, as there are additional steps and considerations due to the changes made in this major release.

Neo4j 3.0 supports direct upgrades from all 2.x releases (recommended to be on latest patch). Pre-2.x users need to upgrade to 2.x before upgrading to 3.0. Production users should note that there are configuration parameter changes required, directory location changes and migration of the on-disk store format that cannot be reversed.

Please ensure you have a valid backup before proceeding. Please see our Upgrading to Neo4j 3.0 FAQ for further details.

Third-party Licenses


  • Added Lucene codecs/Common Analyzers/Memory/QueryParsers under ASL 2.0
  • Dropped Logback Access/Classic/Core which was under Eclipse Public Licence 1.0 / LGPL 2.1
  • Dropped RRD4J (ASL 2.0), scala-parser-combinators (BSD) and SLF4J API Module (MIT)
  • Specific to Neo4j Enterprise edition: We dropped Ganglia Integration for Metrics (ASL 2.0) and gmetric4j (MIT)
Please see this page for more details on third-party licenses.

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