Public Beta
This feature is in Public Beta for all customers of GrapheneDB deploying a Neo4j Community v5 database on a DS3 plan or higher. While in Beta we recommend to avoid using this feature for production environments and use it for evaluation purposes.
We highly appreciate any feedback that you may have. Please reach out to us if you see anything that can be improved or if you encounter any errors.
Overview
When deploying a database at GrapheneDB you get:
- Always a main node. The main node is the server hosting the database that is receiving all your write requests. You can also read from it, but ideally you do it from the Replicas to save all the resources of the main node for your writes and to be able to benefit from the redundancy and availability of the Replicas.
- Optionally Read-replicas. A Read-replica in GrapheneDB is one or more dedicated servers that maintain the same data as the main node by replicating the incoming write transactions.
Replication
Read-replicas replicate the main node write transactions and apply the operations to their data sets asynchronously. How much the replicas lag behind the main node will depend on your load, but we have designed this feature for a realistic under 100ms delay.
Replication provides redundancy and increases data availability. Replicas are deployed automatically in different Availability Zones, providing a level of fault tolerance against zonal outages.
Additionally if you add more than one Replica, replication can provide increased read capacity as clients can send read operations to different servers.
You can also add Replicas to your deployment for other purposes, such as disaster recovery, running expensive read requests without affecting your main node, etc.
Manage Read-replicas
To add or remove a Read-replica, please navigate to the database Overview > Manage Read-replicas view.
You can select the number of Replicas that you want to be added/removed.
After you confirm your selection an operation will start to create/remove Replicas. When a new Replica is added it gets seeded with a snapshot of the latest data of the main node.
There is no downtime involved when adding or removing Read-replicas. Your Main node and the other Replicas are not affected by this operation.