Changes from Neo4j 5.26 LTS to Neo4j 2025.01 and later

Neo4j provides several mechanisms for cluster members to discover each other and form a cluster based on the configuration and the environment in which the cluster is running, as well as the version of Neo4j being used.

In the 2025.01 release, discovery service v1 is removed. Therefore, transitioning from v1 to v2 must be completed before upgrading to any 2025-2026 version. For more details, please refer to the Operations Manual → Moving from discovery service v1 to v2.

In Neo4j 5.26, block format is the default format for all Enterprise Edition databases. Therefore, it is highly recommended that 5.26 LTS Enterprise Edition users migrate all databases to block format before upgrading to any 2025-2026 version to ensure the best possible performance. For details, see Operations Manual → Store formats → Changing the store format of existing databases. The block format supports token names (including node labels, property keys, and relationship type names) of any length up to the GQL identifier max length of 16,383 characters. Thus, token names must adhere to this length limit when migrating from aligned to block format.

standard and high_limit formats are deprecated in 5.23 and will be removed in a future release. For more information, see Operations Manual → Store formats → Format deprecations. For more information on the available store formats per Neo4j version, see Operations Manual → Store formats.

Libraries that depend on the value returned from dbms.components(), such as GraphQL and Neo4j Connectors, must upgrade to the following patch versions before upgrading to Neo4j 2025 to ensure compatibility:

For the full list of deprecations and breaking changes in Neo4j 2025-2026 versions, see the Operations Manual → Deprecations, removals, and changes — Neo4j 2025.x.

For the list of deprecations and changes in Neo4j 2026.x, see the Operations Manual → Deprecations, removals, and changes — Neo4j 2026.x. 1 Depending on how your application interacts with Neo4j, you might need to update your application to work with the new version of Neo4j.