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 Phone +46 704 106975 LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/neubauer Twitter http://twitter.com/peterneubauer http://www.neo4j.org - Your high performance graph database. http://www.thoughtmade.com - Scandinavia's coolest Bring-a-Thing party. 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. Together, we'll > keep taking out the pebbles. > > Cheers, > > Andreas > > > _______________________________________________ > Neo4j mailing list > User@lists.neo4j.org > https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user > _______________________________________________ Neo4j mailing list User@lists.neo4j.org https://lists.neo4j.org/mailman/listinfo/user
