Neo4j Azure hosting and Database location

Question

I know that we can use the VM Depot to get started with the Neo4J in Azur but one thing that is not clear is where should we physically store the DB files. I tried to look around in the net if there are any recommendations on where the physical files would be stored so that then a VM crashes or restarts, the data is not lost.

can someone share their thoughts or point me to a address where some more details can be found on do and don'ts of Neo4j on Azure for a production environment.

Regards Kiran

Answer 1

When you set up a Neo4j VM via VM Depot, that image, by default, configures the database files to reside within the same VM as the server itself. The location is specified in neo4j-server.properties. This lets you simply spin up the VM and start using Neo4j immediately.

However: You'll soon discover that your storage space is limited (I believe the VM instances are set up with a 127GB disk). To work with larger databases, you'll need to attach an additional disk (or disks), each disk up to 1TB in size. These disks, as well as the main VM disk, are backed by blob storage, meaning they're durable - persistent disks.

How you ultimately configure this is up to you, depending on the size of the database and its purpose. The only storage to avoid, if you need persistence, is the scratch disk provided (which is a locally-attached drive with no durability).

Answer 2

The documentation announcing that VM doesn't say. But when you install neo4j as a package on to other similar linux systems (the VM in question is a linux VM) then the data usually goes into /var/lib/neo4j/data . Here's an example:

user@host:/var/lib/neo4j/data$ pwd
/var/lib/neo4j/data
user@host:/var/lib/neo4j/data$ ls
graph.db  keystore  log  neo4j-service.pid  README.txt  rrd
user@host:/var/lib/neo4j/data$ cat README.txt 
Neo4j Data
=======================================

This directory contains all live data managed by this server, including
database files, logs, and other "live" files.

The main directory you really have to have is the "graph.db" directory. That's going to contain the bulk of the data. May as well back up the entirety of this directory. Some of the files (like the .pid file and the README.txt ) of course aren't needed.

Now, there's no guarantee that in the VM that it's going to be /var/lib/neo4j/data but it's going to be something very similar. And what you're going to want is going to be a directory whose name ends in .db since that's the default for new neo4j databases.

To narrow down further, once you get that VM running, just run updatedb then locate *.db | grep neo4j locate *.db | grep neo4j and that's almost certain to find it quickly.