Neo4j 5 introduces several new features and changes for administrators including: 1) Incremental offline data imports that are 10-100x faster than previous versions. 2) New index types that replace BTREE indexes and improve performance. 3) Autonomous clustering that automatically allocates databases across servers for high availability and scalability. 4) Composite databases that allow querying across multiple databases to scale beyond a single database.

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Neo4j 5 for Administrators
Stu Moore
Product Manager Database

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Learn more in
"Aura and Neo4j 5 for Developers"
with John Stegeman
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Strategic Investment in Neo4j
Pillar Axis What is it, and some examples
Experience
Developers & Data Scientists Productivity for developers and data scientists creating applications with Neo4j
Language & Model How developers, data scientists query the graph; innovation, languages
Performance
& Scalability
Write & Import Performance How fast an application/user can get data in and execute write operations
Read & Export Performance How fast an application or user can retrieve data
Scalability & Availability Easy of scaling the infrastructure and providing uninterrupted a users
Operational
Trust
Cloud Native Operations Run in the cloud, designed for Aura; orchestration, containers and Marketplace
Admin, Operability,
Observability
How easy it is to operate
Supportability How easy it is to support; documentation, diagnostic logging, upgrades
Security Secure access to data; SSO, RBAC, SSL, LDAP, ISO 27001

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Write and Import
- Incremental offline import
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Offline Incremental Import
Provides an ultra-high speed method of
batch loading data incrementally
- 10-100x faster than transactional
neo4j-admin database import supports
- New nodes with properties
- New relationships between existing or
new nodes
Need to manual seed the cluster
Indexes are updated
Uniqueness constraints are upheld
Property existence constraints are upheld
Prepare
(offline)
Build
(readonly
online)
Merge
(offline)
All in one
(offline)
CSV
Prerec
checks

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Read and Export
- Indexing
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Indexing
Neo4j 5 does not support BTREE Indexes
New RANGE Indexes
- Comparison operators =, >, <, >=, <= (and !=)
- Booleans, int, floats, strings (& STARTS WITH) temporals
New POINT Indexes
- Multidimensional range & distance predicates
FULLTEXT Indexes
- Support lists & arrays
Improved performance for TEXT indexes
- with CONTAINS and ENDS WITH
CAUTION before you migrate from Neo4j 4.4
- Create new RANGE and POINT Indexes
- Migration will remove BTREE Indexes automatically

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Scalability & Availability
- Autonomous Clustering
- COMPOSITE Databases
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Autonomous Clustering Cloud-ready architecture for global clusters
One of the most sophisticated clustering
architectures in the database industry
● Elasticity: scale up and down on demand
● Cluster Scalability:
○ Tens of machines
○ Designed to work with Fabric: shared view of schema &
security
● Databases run on a subset of servers
● Extreme Performance: Add/remove “secondaries” on
the fly to support variable workloads on demand
● Guaranteed availability & consistency
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Autonomous Clustering Auto Allocation
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Admin specifies the database topology that is required, for example
- 3x primaries for Fault Tolerance and 1x secondary for read scalability (or for use to take backups)
Autonomous Clustering allocates the database copies to suitable servers in the cluster
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1
1 2
CREATE DATABASE knowledge
TOPOLOGY 3 PRIMARIES
1 SECONDARY;

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Autonomous Clustering Auto Allocation
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Admin specifies another database topology that is required e.g 3x primaries for Fault Tolerance
Autonomous Clustering allocates the database copies to suitable servers in the cluster
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3
3
4

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Autonomous Clustering Auto Allocation
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Admin specifies the database topology that is required e.g 3x primaries for Fault Tolerance
Autonomous Clustering allocates the database copies to suitable servers in the cluster
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5
5
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Autonomous Clustering Auto Allocation
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To scale out, just add another server, then run REALLOCATE
To scale in, just run DEALLOCATE databases from the server you want to remove
Then DROP the server
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Why Fabric? A way to…
Unlock more business value
• Query across multiple business graphs FEDERATION
Operate at scale
• Virtually unlimited horizontal scale
• Increase performance without vertical scale
◦ SHARDs queried in parallel
• Improved operations SHARD TeraByte of data into 100s GB
◦ Manage smaller data sets
◦ Backup / restore
What Is It?
• Execute queries in
parallel across
databases
• Chain queries for
sophisticated
real-time analysis
• Query a database
composed of other
databases

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Scale beyond the database with COMPOSITE
The COMPOSITE DATABASE holds
the definition of what can queried.
E.g., customer Accounts have been
sharded into 3 databases;
● A to G
● H to M
● N to Z
All three databases can be queried
through "Accounts".
Accounts
COMPOSITE for Sharded
Databases
A
AtoG
HtoM
NtoZ

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Query beyond the database with COMPOSITE
The COMPOSITE DATABASE holds the
definition of what can queried.
E.g. a Federated Fraud Detection
database created from;
● Business Loans
● Personal Loans
● Credit Cards
All three databases can be queried
through "Fraud".
Fraud
COMPOSITE for Federated
Databases
F
Business_Loans
Personal_Loans
Credit_Cards

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Scale beyond the database and cluster with COMPOSITE
Extend the query across clusters
● Need host shards to manage ultra large datasets
● Access archived data
● Query federated databases on different clusters
● Add REMOTE ALIASes to your Composite database
The COMPOSITE DATABASE ( C ) holds the
definition of what can queried
C
Multi Cluster
C

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Creating Fabric in Cypher-shell
<- Create the shards
<- Create Fabric
<- Add the shards
<- What does it look like
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neo4j@neo4j> CREATE DATABASE tx2022q3;
neo4j@neo4j> CREATE DATABASE tx2022q4;
neo4j@neo4j> CREATE DATABASE tx2023q1;
neo4j@neo4j> CREATE COMPOSITE DATABASE transactions;
neo4j@neo4j> CREATE ALIAS transactions.tx2022q3 FOR DATABASE tx2022q3;
neo4j@neo4j> CREATE ALIAS transactions.tx2022q4 FOR DATABASE tx2022q4;
neo4j@neo4j> CREATE ALIAS transactions.tx2023q1 FOR DATABASE tx2023q1;
neo4j@neo4j> SHOW DATABASE transactions
name type constituents
"transactions" "composite" ["transactions.tx2022q3",
"transactions.tx2022q4",
"transactions.tx2023q1"]

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Querying Fabric in Cypher-shell
<- Get a list of graphs
<- Fabric consists of shards
<- Querying fabric
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neo4j@neo4j> UNWIND graph.names() AS graphName RETURN graphName
╒═══════════════════════╕
│"graphName" │
╞═══════════════════════╡
│"transactions.tx2022q3"│
├───────────────────────┤
│"transactions.tx2023q1"│
├───────────────────────┤
│"transactions.tx2022q4"│
└───────────────────────┘
neo4j@neo4j> UNWIND graph.names() AS graphName
CALL {
USE graph.byName(graphName)
MATCH (t) RETURN t
} RETURN t

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Scale beyond the database and cluster with COMPOSITE
With Fabric
● Dynamically create sharded & federated graphs in Cypher
● Fully integrated into the Neo4j database infrastructure
● Fault Tolerance for the COMPOSITE database
○ No more proxy servers, no more NLB
● Query the COMPOSITE database to query across databases
● Extend the query across multiple clusters
The COMPOSITE DATABASE ( C ) holds the
definition of what can queried
C
Sharded Cluster
Federated Cluster
C
C
Multi Cluster
C

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Learn more in
"Foundations for Scale"
with Hugo Firth and Tobias Johansson
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Cloud Native Operations
- Server Side Routing is Enabled
- Immutable Privileges
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Server-Side Routing is enabled
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Public Internet
Private Network (Cloud VPC)
Single “load balanced”
public address
L F F S S
Server Side Routing The cluster will route the requests to the
Primary Leader or Secondary, depending
whether it is a write or a read request.

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Immutable Privileges
Secure Cloud Operations
- Restrict actions of users/roles with admin privileges
- Applied when the database is created
- Can only be changed with local access and a restart
dbms.security.auth_enabled=false + server
- Add & remove privileges using IMMUTABLE keyword
Admin
Security
Init File
E.g. DENY CREATE
DATABASE
Creation
Disallowed

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Operations
- Neo4j Ops Manager
- Backup/Restore ops
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Neo4j Ops Manager
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- Administer complex tasks like security and cluster
- Help with operations like upgrade and migration
- Manage all your Neo4j instances
- Monitor metrics, status and see intelligent alerts

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Learn more in
"Neo4j Ops Manager"
with Chris Shelmadine
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Backup and Restore: More capability, with less storage
● Differential backups: significant storage cost savings
● Point-in-time restore across differential sections of the
backup chain '
● New behaviour similar to other DBMSs
● API to ease operability
● Now a single immutable file and not a directory
● Legacy Neo4j 4 style backup / restore behaviour available
Full Diff Diff Full2
Diff
Diff
Full
Diff Diff
Full
Recover
Restore until
time or tx id

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Security
- Impersonation in Cypher-Shell
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Impersonation in Cypher-shell
● Test permissions are correct
● Check if scripts execute for different users
● Demonstrate effective permissions policy to
auditors or other members of governance
cypher-shell -u neo4j -a bolt://localhost:7687
--impersonate stu
password: *******
Connected to Neo4j using Bolt protocol version 5
at bolt://localhost:7687 as user neo4j
impersonating stu.
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neo4j@neo4j> :impersonate stu
neo4j(stu)@neo4j> SHOW CURRENT USER;
+---------------------------------------------+
| user | roles | suspended | home |
+---------------------------------------------+
| "stu" | ["PUBLIC"] | NULL | NULL |
+---------------------------------------------+

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Supportability
- Support life cycle
- Continuous Release
- Any-to-any rolling upgrade
- Breaking changes
- Migration from Neo4j 4.4
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Support life cycle for Neo4j 4, 5 & 6
2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030
5.X new features
4.4
GA
4.4 long term support - fixes only
4 > 5 migration
window
Neo4j 5
GA
5.lts = long term support - fixes only
6.X new features
Neo4j 6
GA
6.lts = long term support
5 > 6 migration
window
6 > 7 migration
window
Nov Jun Nov Jun Nov Jun Nov Jun Nov Jun Nov Jun Nov Jun Nov Jun Nov Jun
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New 1 Year to migrate
New! 1 Year to migrate

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The old branched Support Model in Neo4j 4
4.1.0
4.0.0
GA
4.2.0 4.2.n Patches
4.0.n
Patches
- New features in major and minor releases
- Minor releases every 6 months
- Each minor branch supported for 18 months
- Long Term Support for 3 yrs
- Upgrade only supported sequential Minors
i.e. from 4.2 -> 4.3 -> 4.4 and NOT 4.2->4.4
4.0.1
Patches
4.1.1 Patches 4.1.n Patches

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Neo4j 5 Continuous Release Support Model
5.LTS.0
Fixes ONLY
Fixes
Frequent
5.1.0
5.LTS+n.0
Features
LTS in June 2024
Final Features
Released
End of
Support
Nov 2027
Upgrade to the latest version to receive latest
fixes from Support
Major change in how we handle DB versions:
- New features and fixes released in each minor releases
- Frequent minor releases to Aura & Neo4j
- Ensure two-way migration between self-managed and Aura
- Long Term Support for 3.5 yrs - for self-managed customers who prefer older, stable versions

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Easy upgrade - any-to-any 5.x version rolling upgrade
From Neo4j 5 GA:
- Either, upgrade to each minor version in turn
- Or, skip versions upgrade to any minor
Inc. Autonomous Clustering rolling upgrades
Transition between self-managed to Aura
Do I have to upgrade? Only when you need
bug fixes, or want new features.
Neo4j
5.1
Neo4j
5.2
Neo4j
5.3
Neo4j
5.1
Neo4j
5.n
Neo4j
5.5

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Migrating* from Neo4j 4.4 to Neo4j 5
*Illustrative please use the documentation
Plan & Prep
1) Review the Migration Guide
2) Create new Indexes & Constraints in Neo4j 4.4
3) Install Neo4j 5 (any minor version)
neo4j-admin server migrate-configuration
4) Check conf files & update plugins
5) Check Neo4j 5 starts ok
6) Set to Neo4j 4.4 to read only (or off-line)
Neo4j 5
Migration
7) Perform an Online Backup of Neo4j 4.4
8) Restore database backup (or dump)
9) Migrate the database (this is fast)
10) Create database and restore roles
11) Confirm database starts on Neo4j 5
12) Seed cluster from the server
13) Redirect clients to Neo4j 5 database
14) Take Neo4j 4.4 offline
neo4j
conf
Guide
Neo4j 4.4

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Breaking changes in 5.0 ONLY
Why are we doing this: for the long term benefit of the product
- To improve the administrative surface of the product, and make it easier for new practitioners
- Improve Supportability over the long term, while these changes will impact existing practitioners
neo4j-admin
- Commands / args were inconsistent
- New backup and restore behaviour
neo4j.conf
- Identifiable namespaces
- Settings applied to database or cluster
- Migration utility provided
neo4j-admin server migrate-configuration
REMOVAL
- BTREE indexes replaced by RANGE and
POINT indexes
Java 17 runtime
- Performance improvements in latest
long term supported version of Java.

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Neo4j 5 for Administrators
- Write & Import Performance
- Read & Export Performance
- Scale & Availability
- Cloud Native Operations
- Operations
- Supportability
- Security
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Thank you