Migrating your Neo4j AuraDB Free Instance to another AuraDB tier (Pro or Enterprise)

Once you have used AuraDB Free tier and decide to move to run a production workload or need more data storage and resources to power your application, you would want to use AuraDB Professional or AuraDB Enterprise.

Currently, you can migrate a Free tier instance to the Professional tier from the console by choosing one of the Upgrade to Professional or Clone to New options.

To migrate to the Enterprise tier you should follow the manual process outlined in this article.

Upgrade to Professional (Works for AuraDB)

Upgrading a Free tier instance to the Professional tier can now be done directly from the console by selecting the Upgrade to Professional option as illustrated in the screenshot below.

On the upgrade to Professional page, note the warning regarding the default version is now version 5.

Select the region, Instance size, Instance name, populate the I understand tick box and then click on Upgrade to Professional button

Clone (Works for Aura Professional and AuraDS) 

The other way is to clone your existing free tier AuraDB Instance to the Professional tier. 

• Either at the main page or at the detail view (when you click the AuraDB Instance name)  click on the ... button for the Clone features.
• Select the target desired:
  • A new AuraDB Instance
  • An existing AuraDB Instance (the content will get replaced)
• Select the type : AuraDB (graph database) or AuraDS (graph data science).

• For AuraDB : Select the type, AuraDB Instance size, populate the details and finally click on Clone Instance
  
• For AuraDS: select the name, enter the number of current or projected number of nodes and relationships (using projected would suggest size more accurately than using the limited numbers from AuraDBFree).
    
• For AuraDS you also need to select the algorithms and hit Calculate Estimate to get the recommended AuraDB Instance size:
  

Manual Process

The second migration process is manual, but at the same time it is very simple and easy:

In the Free AuraDB Instance:

• [OPTIONAL but recommended] Capture existing index and constraint definitions.
  
  • run the cypher statement SHOW CONSTRAINTS YIELD createStatement and save result to a file, to use later in the process.
  • run the cypher statement SHOW INDEXES YIELD createStatement and save result to a file to use later in the process.
• [OPTIONAL but recommended] Drop the indexes and constraints.
  • run the cypher statement SHOW CONSTRAINTS YIELD name RETURN 'DROP CONSTRAINT ' + name + ';' in order to generate the commands to drop existing constraints. Then execute the generate commands to drop existing constraints.
  • run the cypher statement SHOW INDEXES YIELD name RETURN 'DROP INDEX ' + name +';' in order to generate the commands to drop existing indexes. Then execute the generate commands to drop existing indexes.

For more detail regarding the capture and recreating of indexes and constrains, please refer to Indexes - Capture / Drop / Recreate existing knowledge base article.

In the console (Activities on AuraDB Free):

• Download snapshot/Dump locally (the daily automatic snapshot)
  • In Aura Console https://console.neo4j.io/#databases select the AuraDB Instance
  • Go to Snapshots tab
    
  • Save locally the Dump file (preserve the .dump extension)

In the console(Activities on AuraDB Professional or AuraDB Enterprise) :

• Create a new AuraDB Instance in AuraDB Professional or AuraDB Enterprise with the right resource sizing.
• Upload via Console drag and drop or push-to-cloud
  • From the Aura Console: Drag and drop 
  • Using the command line: neo4j-admin push-to-cloud

In the newly created AuraDB Professional or Enterprise Instance:

• [OPTIONAL] Once the AuraDB Instance is loaded and started, you can now recreate the indexes and constraints, using the information captured earlier in the process or refer to Indexes - Capture / Drop / Recreate existing knowledge base article.