Read-only mode
Understanding read-only mode
There are 2 cases in which your database will be in read-only mode:
- Youâve intentionally set it up to prevent your dataset from being altered.
- It was automatically set to read-only mode because it exceeded it storage limits.
Setting your database to read-only mode
Although itâs not a frequent use-case, you may want to eliminate any potential for online data content changes.
Follow these steps to set your database to read-only mode:
- Navigate to the Configure tab on our admin interface and click on Edit configuration button
- On the Read-only mode section, click on Enable link
- Click on Apply and then restart button.
Database exceeding storage limits
When a database exceeds its plan limits for disk storage, or nodes/relationships in Hobby plans, the database will automatically switch to read-only mode.
We set the database to read-only in this scenario to ensure your database doesnât exceed the assigned disk space, and to prevent further issues that can result from running out of space. We send a notification out to the account owner when disk usage reaches 70%.
If you need to check the status of your database storage limit, you can do so from the GrapheneDB UI Overview tab. From our UI, you will see the limit you have exceeded by, as well as a box alerting you of the database read-only mode.

Plan limits
In the GrapheneDB UI Overview tab you will find the limits of your plan and how many resources are being used by your instance.
All the plans have a maximum storage limit, except for the Hobby plan, which also has nodes / relationship limits. You will find all the plan limits in our pricing web page.
Please note that Hobby plans have also a disk size limit of 256MB.
Switch back to read-write mode
If you wish to switch your database back to read-write mode, the simplest solution is to increase the database capacity by upgrading to a higher plan. This can be done by cloning the database from the UI. You can read more about upgrading the database plan in this article .
If upgrading is not option for you, you can always empty your database from our admin interface by clicking on the Empty database button found in the Admin tab.
If you want to reduce the size of your database to stay within your planâs limits, but donât want to delete your complete dataset, we recommend you follow the steps below:
- Unpack the downloaded tarball and put the directory inside the /data directory of your local Neo4j installation.
- Start your local instance and reduce your dataset
- Stop your local instance, compress the dataset and restore your GrapheneDB database with the compressed file (Admin tab, Restore database button). You can find more information about restoring a local dataset into GrapheneDB here.
Updated almost 6 years ago