Visual tour
Instances
An instance in Desktop represents a DBMS, database management system, which is a Neo4j server installation which contains a minimum of the system database and a default database.
Upon creation of an instance, the default database is called neo4j, but you can rename it or create a new database as the default.
Neo4j Desktop includes a free Developers License of Neo4j Enterprise Edition which gives the user local access to Enterprise Edition features, such as multiple databases.
An instance in Desktop can thus contain a number of databases in addition to the system and default databases.
See the Operations Manual → Database administration for more information on multiple databases.
When you create a new instance (with the Create instance button), this will be with the default version of Neo4j. However, you can also select a different version of Neo4j. Keep in mind that this often requires the resources for this to be downloaded and therefore requires an internet connection. A new instance is labeled as such until it has been started for the first time, and therefore it is possible to see more than one instance with the New label.
Your existing instances are listed by the time they were created, in descending order, but with any running instance listed on top. You can configure this in the dropdown to the left of the Create instance button.
Tools
Desktop offers several ways to interact with the graph. One way is using graph tools and Desktop comes bundled with four, Import, Query, Explore, and Dashboards. Import lets you import local .CSV files. The same tool is also available in the Aura console but with many more file formats available for import. Query and Explore are used to visualize and query the graph and they are available in the Aura console as well as standalone tools (as Browser and Bloom, respectively). Dashboards is a tool for presenting graph data in a dashboard format and is also available in the Aura console. For more information about the tools, see pages on Import, Query, Explore, and Dashboards.
The tools are available in the left-hand navigation.
