In the previous lesson, you learned how to manage your Aura instance, including inspecting connection details and configuring your instance as needs change.
In this lesson you will learn how to:
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Connect to your Aura instance
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Use different tools to interact with your database
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Ensure connection security
Connecting to your instance
To connect to your Aura instance, you will need the connection details provided in the Inspect section of your instance management options, as well as the credentials file you downloaded when creating the instance, for example:
| Entry | Value |
|---|---|
NEO4J_URI |
neo4j+s://<instanceid>.databases.neo4j.io |
NEO4J_USERNAME |
neo4j |
NEO4J_PASSWORD |
<your password> |
NEO4J_DATABASE |
neo4j |
AURA_INSTANCEID |
<instanceid> |
AURA_INSTANCENAME |
Instance01 |
To view the connection details, navigate to your instance in the Aura console and click on the three dots on the right side of the instance card. Select Inspect from the dropdown menu.
The connection details include:
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ID: The unique identifier for your database instance.
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Connection URI: The connection string used to connect to your database.
Also, you will need the username and password you set when creating the instance, which are not shown in the inspect panel for security reasons. To retrieve the connection password, review the document downloaded when you created the instance.
Once you have these details, you can use them to connect through the integrated query tool, the explore tab, the dashboards, or any external application that supports Neo4j connections.
![Connect with Credentials][credentials_prompt](images/05_connect_credentials_prompt.png)
Snapshot Purpose
What is the primary purpose of Aura snapshots?
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❏ To monitor database performance over time
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✓ To provide backup and recovery capabilities for your data
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❏ To compress your database to save storage space
Hint
Think about what you need most when something goes wrong with your database. What would help you get back to a working state?
Solution
Snapshots provide backup and recovery capabilities for your data.
Snapshots are Aura’s backup system - they allow you to create save points that you can restore to if something goes wrong, export for long-term storage, or use to create new instances with the same data.
Summary
In this lesson, you learned about Aura’s comprehensive backup and restore capabilities. You now understand how snapshots work as Aura’s backup system, the three key actions you can take with snapshots (export, create new instance, restore), and how to restore from local backup files.
You also learned about the important limitations to keep in mind, particularly the 4GB file size limit for console uploads and the various restrictions that apply to different Aura tiers.
In the next lesson, you will explore the tools available in the Aura Console to interact with your database instance.