Upgrading Your Existing Aura 3.5 Database to Aura 4

This article covers converting your existing Aura database to use Neo4j 4. To import your community or enterprise edition Neo4j 3.x database into Aura 4, please see Importing your 3.x database into Aura.

With the release of Neo4j 4 for Aura, customers may wonder how they can start taking advantage of the new features that are available. Because 4 represents a major shift in how Neo4j operates, simply stopping a running database and restarting as the new version is not sufficient. Instead, you will want to download an export of your database and then import it into a new instance. This article will outline the steps to do so.

Exporting your data

To start, open your Aura console to the list of active databases. From there, click on the database you want to upgrade, then on the Backups tab of the database details page. Your most recent backup will be at the top of the list (some backups may not have an export available for them, this is normal). 

Click the Export link to the right of the most recent export to download a file called "graph.db.dump" to your local disk.

Create a new database

On the main Aura console page, scroll to the bottom of the page and choose "Create a database".

Under "Neo4j Version" choose 4, and select the region you want your database deployed in. This does not need to be the same region as your existing database.

As always, copy the password that is displayed for future use. Let the database creation complete before moving to the next step. 

Import to the database just created

The final step will be to import your data.

If the dump file is smaller than 4GB you can do this in the Aura console otherwise please use the command line tool push-to-cloud.

In the Aura console, open your new database and click the "Import Data" tab. Then click the "Choose file" button to navigate to the location of the "graph.db.dump" file saved in the first step.

You'll be prompted to confirm you want to overwrite all of the existing data in your new database; click Upload to continue. 

Wait for import to complete

We recommend getting a coffee, tea, or other favorite beverage at this step. It will take anywhere from a few minutes for a small database, to potentially an hour or more if you have an exceptionally large amount of data and a slow internet connection, for the import to finish. 

Check that the data was imported properly

Before you switch your application over to use the new database, you'll want to perform some tests to make sure that everything is working as expected. One quick way to do this is to open a browser window for both the original and new databases and run this Cypher query against them, comparing the output:

match (n)
optional match (n)-[r]-() 
return count(n) as Nodes, count(r) as Relationships

The numbers of nodes and relationships should be the same. If they are not, please open a ticket with our support team. 

Note that you'll still want to run whatever tests your developers have in place to be safe. 

Enjoy the new features available

With the exception of running multiple databases, there are a number of improvements available in Neo4j 4. We recommend reviewing the complete list of deprecations, additions, and compatibility notes for both versions 4.0 and 4.1 to gain a complete view of these changes.