Neo4j Aura July 2026 Release

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

🚀 New Cypher 25 features

Introduced the
GROUP BY
subclause to
WITH
and
RETURN
. The
GROUP BY
clause allows the user to explicitly state the grouping keys for an aggregating operation. This is an alternative to the implicit grouping already available in Cypher, and is introduced to better align Cypher with the GQL standard. See Cypher Manual -> Group By
Adds the GQL
cardinality()
function for Cypher 25; it returns the number of keys in a
MAP
, elements in a
LIST
, or nodes and relationships in a
PATH
. See Cypher Manual -> Scalar Functions - Cardinality
Procedure calls that run against the system database can now filter results using the
WHERE
clause. See Operations Manual -> Call a procedure.

Other relevant updates

High-Fidelity Quantized vector search is now generally available. The default index configuration for new indexes is Scalar quantization with an expansion factor of 1.5, existing indexes are unaffected until they're rebuilt. See Vector indexes - Cypher Manual.

🛠️ Bug fixes

Fixed an issue where notification filters set on the driver session were dropped when a query was forwarded via server-side routing, causing suppressed notifications to still be returned to the client.
Fixed an issue where creating a vector index when setting
vector.quantization.enabled
:
false
without
vector.quantization.type
:
'NONE'
in the index configuration.
The backup correctly picks the most recent valid chain when restoring from a folder, which would previously fail if the last backup was an orphaned diff.
Clustering - When the raft prefetch buffer is reset, the size of the buffer is also now reset
Cypher - Fixed a bug where
EXISTS
expression nested in a quantified path pattern would trigger a class cast exception.

For full details of all updates and fixes in this release, as well as links to relevant documentation please visit: Release Notes: Neo4j Aura Database – July 2026