Overview: Neo4j JDBC Driver

You can find the full documentation at: http://neo4j-contrib.github.io/neo4j-jdbc/

This is a JDBC driver for Neo4j supporting Cypher over JDBC.

This driver was mainly developed by Larus BA, Italy, a certified consulting and integration solutions partner for Neo4j. Thank you so much for all your work.

Being a graph database, Neo4j is not serving data in a relational way, nevertheless thanks to this driver it’s possible for projects that are using the classic JDBC connector in the relational paradigm to interact with Neo4j.

This driver supports various types of database transports, through:

• The Bolt protocol using jdbc:neo4j:bolt://<host>:<port>/ from Neo4j 3.0+

• The Bolt+Routing protocol using jdbc:neo4j:bolt+routing://<host>:<port>/ from Neo4j 3.1+ to 3.5.x

• The neo4j protocol using jdbc:neo4j:neo4j://<host>:<port>/ from Neo4j 4.0+

• The HTTP protocol using jdbc:neo4j:http://<host>:<port>/ from Neo4j 2.0+

Going forward there will also be support for:

• direct file connection

• embedded connection

Note	The previous JDBC driver for Neo4j 2.x was moved to the https://github.com/neo4j-contrib/neo4j-jdbc-2x repository.

Table 1. Versions compatibility

Neo4j-JDBC	Neo4j version	Neo4j Driver	Java	Protocols	Temporal and Spatial
3.5.1	3.4.x - 3.5.x	1.7.5	1.8	http, bolt, bolt+routing	yes
4.0.0	3.5.x - 4.x	4.0.1	11	http, bolt, bolt+routing	yes

Maven dependency

For the all-in-one module supporting both Bolt and HTTP, you can simply use:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.neo4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>neo4j-jdbc-driver</artifactId>
    <version>{neo4j-jdbc-version}</version>
</dependency>

If you want only one of the protocols, you can depend on its module:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.neo4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>neo4j-jdbc-bolt</artifactId>
    <version>{neo4j-jdbc-version}</version>
</dependency>

or

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.neo4j</groupId>
    <artifactId>neo4j-jdbc-http</artifactId>
    <version>{neo4j-jdbc-version}</version>
</dependency>

Minimum viable snippet

Dependency declaration

org.neo4j:neo4j-jdbc-driver:4.0.0

Run Query

// Connecting
try (Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:neo4j:bolt://localhost", 'neo4j', password)) {

    // Querying
    String query = "MATCH (u:User)-[:FRIEND]-(f:User) WHERE u.name = {1} RETURN f.name, f.age";
    try (PreparedStatement stmt = con.prepareStatement(query)) {
        stmt.setString(1,"John");

        try (ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery()) {
            while (rs.next()) {
                System.out.println("Friend: "+rs.getString("f.name")+" is "+rs.getInt("f.age"));
            }
        }
    }
}

Please note that the example above uses the try-with-resource blocks that automatically closes resources when the try block is exited.

Usage with Neo4j Server

• Install a Neo4j 3.3.x server and start it with the Bolt protocol enabled

• Connect with URLs in the following 3 forms:

  • jdbc:neo4j:http://<host>:<port>/ (e.g. jdbc:neo4j:http://localhost/)

  • jdbc:neo4j:bolt://<host>:<port>/ (e.g. jdbc:neo4j:bolt://localhost/)

  • jdbc:neo4j:bolt+routing://<host>:<port>/ (e.g. jdbc:neo4j:bolt+routing://localhost?routing:policy=eu)

• You can also use additional parameters in the URL separated by an & character for authentication, debug mode, SSL encryption and flattening e.g. jdbc:neo4j:bolt://localhost/?user=neo4j&password=xxxx&debug=true&nossl&flatten=[-1,100,1000]

Note	We’ve deprecated the usage of , as the parameter separator in favour of & to be compliant with the URL parameter syntax.

• Add the JDBC driver dependency or jar file to your project

• Get a connection from DriverManager

• Execute queries and transactions using the Cypher graph query language

List of Supported Neo4j Configuration parameters

Property Name	Supported Values	Description
trust.strategy	TRUST_ALL_CERTIFICATES, TRUST_CUSTOM_CA_SIGNED_CERTIFICATES, TRUST_SYSTEM_CA_SIGNED_CERTIFICATES	The supported trusted strategies
trusted.certificate.file	File Path	The path of the certificate file
connection.acquisition.timeout	Any Long	The acquisition time
connection.liveness.check.timeout	Any Long	The liveness check timeout
connection.timeout	Any Long	The connection timeout
encryption	true/false	Activate the application encryption
leaked.sessions.logging	true/false	If log leaked session
max.connection.lifetime	Any Long	The connection lifetime
max.connection.poolsize	Any Int	The max pool size
max.transaction.retry.time	Any Long	The retry time for a transaction transient error
database	String	The database name, if not specified connects to the default instance
readonly	true/false	If specified creates a fixed read only connection, any further modification via the Connection#setReadOnly method will have no effect
usebookmarks	true/false	If specified disables the bookmarks

Flattening

As most JDBC clients and tools don’t support complex objects, the driver can flatten returned nodes and relationships by providing all their properties as individual columns with names like u.name,r.since if you just return a node u or relationship r.

This is enabled with the JDBC-URL parameter flatten=<rows>, where <rows> indicates how many rows are sampled to determine those columns. With -1 all rows are sampled and with any other value you determine the number of rows being looked at.

Tomcat

When the JDBC driver is configured as a JNDI resource into Tomcat, you must include these two arguments on Resource configuration:

• removeAbandonedOnBorrow="true"

• closeMethod="close"

Here’s an example:

    <Resource name="jdbc/neo4j"
              auth="Container"
              type="javax.sql.DataSource"
              username="neo4j"
              password="password"
              driverClassName="org.neo4j.jdbc.bolt.BoltDriver"
              url="jdbc:neo4j:bolt://localhost"
              removeAbandonedOnBorrow="true"
              closeMethod="close"
              />

Building the driver yourself

First clone the repository.

This project is composed by the following modules:

• Neo4j JDBC - the core module

• Neo4j JDBC - Bolt - module supporting the Bolt protocol

• Neo4j JDBC - HTTP - module supporting the HTTP protocol

• Neo4j JDBC - Driver packaging - module to package all above modules

Run all unit tests & integration tests

mvn clean test

Run only integration tests

mvn clean test -Pintegration-test

Run performance tests

mvn clean test -Pperformance-test

Note	To run the performance test, you must have a Neo4j Server 3.3.x running with the Bolt protocol enabled on port 7687 (default).

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Neo4j and LARUS Business Automation

The "Neo4j JDBC Driver" is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.

You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Feedback

Please provide feedback and report bugs as GitHub issues or join the neo4j-users Slack and ask on the #neo4j-jdbc channel. You might also ask on StackOverflow, please tag your question there with neo4j and jdbc.