The latest release of Spring Data Neo4j, version 4.1, introduces significant improvements, including support for different protocol drivers, allowing users to use the Neo4j embedded database again as an alternative to communicating with the Neo4j server over HTTP. This feature is particularly useful for unit testing and also enables the use of the new binary Bolt protocol for Neo4j 3.0. The release also provides full support for rich relationship entities, which enable users to map relationships to annotated entity types and create, load, and save them as first-class citizens. Under the hood, a rewrite of the Cypher statement generator has led to substantial performance improvements, with one to two orders of magnitude gains in performance and memory usage. Additionally, complex Cypher queries can now be mapped into DTO classes with more complete result mappings, allowing users to extract exactly the information they need without loading large parts of the graph database into application memory. The release also includes improved driver configuration options, including an `ogm.properties` file for configuring the HTTP driver and a new Spring bean configuration option. The team from GraphAware has been instrumental in helping with the development and testing of this release.