Graph platform Neo4j today announced the general availability of Neo4j 5, the latest version of its cloud-ready graph database. Neo4j is following up on its achievements in 2021, which include surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue, closing a $325M series F financing round at over $2B valuation, which it calls “the largest funding round in database history,” and launching a free tier of its fully managed cloud service.

Neo4j 5 promises better ease of use and performance through improvements in its query language and engine, as well as automated scale-out and convergence across deployments. Jim Webber, chief scientist at Neo4j, discussed Neo4j 5 as well as the bigger picture in the graph market in an interview with VentureBeat.

Markets and Markets anticipates the graph database market will reach $2.4 billion by 2023, up from $821.8 million in 2018. And analysts at Gartner expect that enterprise graph processing and graph databases will grow 100% annually in 2022, facilitating decision-making in 30% of organizations by 2023. However, the graph market isn’t immune to the economic downturn and has its own intricacies as well.

This is the first major release for Neo4j in two-and-a-half years, following up on Neo4j 4 released in 2020. Back then, CEO Emil Eifrem identified ease of use as the major objective going forward. To help achieve that objective, Neo4j doubled its engineering workforce between versions 4 and 5, from 100 to 200 engineers. The increased engineering resources are allowing Neo4j to improve the developer experience in several areas, Webber said.

Webber said that Cypher, Neo4j’s query language, has evolved considerably in a number of ways. First, the Neo4j engineers and product management team made “spontaneous improvements.” Those mostly have to do with simplifying pattern matching in the language to behave in a way that resembles more what SQL users would expect. While Cypher was able to perform pattern matching previously, the new syntax makes the code shorter and easier to get, Webber said.

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