Release Date: 27 May 2026

The Neo4j Aura May release has started to roll out, commencing on AuraDB Free and progressing to higher tiers later.

Release Note for Neo4j 2026.05 (Release date: 27 May 2026)

Composable commands: several Cypher commands can now be combined in a single query and mixed with other Cypher statements. The commands currently integrated with Cypher are: SHOW INDEXES, SHOW CONSTRAINTS, SHOW CURRENT GRAPH TYPE, SHOW FUNCTIONS, SHOW PROCEDURES, SHOW SETTINGS, SHOW TRANSACTIONS, SHOW DATABASES, and TERMINATE TRANSACTIONS.
The ACYCLIC path mode was released in 2026.04, with the limitation that it cannot be used in conjunction with ANY, SHORTEST, SHORTEST k, ALL SHORTEST, or SHORTEST k GROUPS. That limitation is lifted in 2026.05. Users can ask for SHORTEST/ANY paths that follow the ACYCLIC path mode (no repetition of nodes in the same path). See Cypher Manual -> Mixing restrictive path selectors and explicit path modes.
Added new string functions: string.indexOf, string.join, string.regexReplace.This functionality was already available via apoc.text.* functions, and is now also in the native Cypher language. The related APOC functions have been deprecated. See Cypher Manual -> String functions.

Bug fixes

Fixed a concurrency issue when acquiring network channels. This avoids messages being delivered out of order which would slow down the write path because the log matching would force a message to be resent.

In the parallel runtime, the planner previously prioritized the Repeat operator over VarExpand for variable-length patterns when the input cardinality was exactly 1, such as during a single starting-node lookup. While this could significantly boost execution speed, it also occasionally led to dramatic increases in memory consumption, which can cause queries to fail. Consequently, this behavior is now disabled by default.

To re-enable the original behavior for specific queries, use the new parallelRepeatHeuristic preparser option:

CYPHER parallelRepeatHeuristic=enabled

MATCH (a:A {prop: 123}) ((n)-[r:R]->(m))+ (b) RETURN a, b

Accepted values for this option are enabled and disabled (the default is disabled).

Addressed a missing planned leveraged order in the pipelined runtime that was causing COUNT(DISTINCT) aggregations to overcount under specific conditions.
We now throw an error when creating an auth rule with an invalid time function, instead of failing the evaluation at authorization time.
Fixed an issue impacting the aggregation function stDev() (which returns the standard deviation for the given value over a group for a sample of a population). The function would return 0 rather than null for empty input. That has now been fixed, and null is returned.

Please refer to the changelog for full details of the changes, and Neo4j Release notes for all changes to other Neo4j products and services.

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