Guys,
sorry for the bad formatting, Andreas seems to be unfamiliar with
Plain Text mails ;)
The (nicely formatted) blog post is at
http://blog.neo4j.org/2010/10/neo4j-12-milestone-2-one-more-step.html
Enjoy erveryone!
Cheers,
/peter neubauer
VP Product Management, Neo Technology
GTalk: neubauer.peter
Skype peter.neubauer
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http://www.neo4j.org - Your high performance graph database.
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On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Andreas Kollegger
andreas.kolleg...@neotechnology.com wrote:
One more step
With a pebble in your shoe, every step distracts you from where you're going.
For a short walk, the pebble might be tolerable. But, the longer the walk,
the more the pebble becomes a problem. When strutting around with Neo4j, you
should be comfortable, get where you're going quickly, and look good doing
it. With this release, a little sand is being emptied from the Neo4j track
shoes.
This Milestone 2 release features an integrated indexing API, faster graph
operations, and fixes for shutdown problems.
Community shout-out
Thanks to the awesome Neo4j community for helping to get this second
milestone ready. From feedback to code contributions, the project continues
to flourish with the help of an active community of contributors.
Integrated Indexing
The indexing API always felt a little bolted-on-the-side. We've thought about
that, iterated over some refinements, discussed with the community and come
up with a similar API that is a more natural part of the
GraphDatabaseService. The new indexing had been available as a laboratory
component, so some of you may already have been using it. Now, it is part of
the official release.
What's different? Well, the operations are much the same, but now the
GraphDatabaseService has been paired with an IndexManager that provides
Indexes through a more fluent API. Indexes can now refer to Nodes or
Relationships, use values from multiple keys, and do compound queries. It's
quite powerful.
Also, a subtle but significant benefit of the integration: the index service
participates in the shutdown of the GraphDatabaseService. You no longer have
to worry about having a separate index shutdown.
Read more abut the integrated indexing over on the wiki page for the Index
Framework.
Oh, the original indexing is still available, and the two can actually live
side-by-side. You can transition over whenever you're ready.
Performance Improvements
Where the integrated indexing removes some irritation, the kernel
improvements put more spring in your step. The changes are behind-the-scenes
optimizations to caching and some prep work for high-availability (the kernel
is now HA-Ready™). No tweaking needed, just bump up to 1.2.M02 and enjoy
better performance from your graph operations.
Shutdown, Now. Really.
In the previous milestone, the GraphDatabaseService had two problems with
actually shutting down when asked to do so. And, worse, nobody noticed until
the release was out. Community members brought it to our attention on the
mailing list, and even started investigating the causes. A shout-out of
thanks to our alert and good-looking contributors.
The usual problem response unfolded: investigate, replicate, fix-ate, then
validate. The fixes for both shutdown problems are included in this release.
Your JVM should now exit as expected. And, there is now an integration test
which spawns a JVM to make sure the problem doesn't happen again.
This experience prompted some reflection about testing.
Test-ify
While the joy of writing tests may be debatable, everyone appreciates the
benefits of having comprehensive testing. All of the Neo4j components have
unit tests. There are machines conducting long-running concurrency and
performance testing. Now, there is an increasing suite of integration tests
to check inter-component operations and even full JVM startup/shutdown
behavior. Hooray.
You probably do testing as well. Probably, you have to set up some of the
same test fixtures, test harnesses, or other test infrastructure that
everyone else who is working with a graph. Probably, it's similar to what is
used for testing the components. So, we've started to think about testing as
a deliverable.
As a first small step in that direction, you'll find a tests directory in
the milestone download. The code there shows common practice for unit testing
a graph application. Looking forward, we may provide base classes and common
utilities to make testing so easy to do that even the most begrudging test
author won't mind doing it.
Lace up
Try out the new milestone and let us know what you think. Bring up any more
of this, or less of that comments on the mailing list.
