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ArangoDB 1.2: Explore New Features | ArangoDB 2013

We have just released beta2 of ArangoDB 1.2. It is available for download here.
For everyone interested in trying the new version, here’s a quick overview of its major new features & changes:

  • User-defined keys:
    Use your own “_key” values instead of server-generated ids. This also makes querying and referencing documents much easier.
  • Usage of collection names:
    The ArangoDB REST API and the ArangoDB Query Language (AQL) now allow using collection names instead of collection ids. This may greatly simplify using the API and writing queries.
  • REST API for graphs:
    Several graph-related functions are now accessible via ArangoDB’s REST API. There is also a Blueprints implementation for ArangoDB.
  • AQL improvements:
    The ArangoDB Query Language (AQL) now provides additional functions to work with graphs, namely EDGES() to retrieve edges connected to a vertex, and TRAVERSAL() for much more configurable graph traversals. Other functions have also been added to make querying even easier.
  • Fulltext search:
    ArangoDB 1.2 comes with a new “fulltext” index type that allows basic fulltext search queries.
  • CORS support:
    ArangoDB now adds support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, making the ArangoDB’s server-side actions available for cross-domain AJAX requests, too.
  • In-memory collections (experimental):
    This feature provides collections without any persistence. Using this collection type for caches / temporary calculations might result in performance improvements. As there is no durability for in-memory collections, they should not be used for any data that requires persistence.


Starting with ArangoDB 1.2, there’s also a Windows build available that contains the ArangoDB server and all client tools such as arangosh and arangoimp.

A more detailed description of the new features is available in the online manual. Please also check the upgrade notes.

Thanks to @frankmayer_, the PHP driver for ArangoDB is mostly 1.2-ready. Other client language drivers for ArangoDB may not yet fully reflect all the mentioned changes.

Any feedback on the new version is very welcome. If you should find any bugs in it, please use our issue tracker on Github to post them.

Thanks again to all people who provided feedback and suggested improvements during the development of 1.2.

Jan Steemann

Jan Steemann

After more than 30 years of playing around with 8 bit computers, assembler and scripting languages, Jan decided to move on to work in database engineering. Jan is now a senior C/C++ developer with the ArangoDB core team, being there from version 0.1. He is mostly working on performance optimization, storage engines and the querying functionality. He also wrote most of AQL (ArangoDB’s query language).

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