The Neo4j Manual v2.1.211.9. Using Periodic Commit

Note See Section 11.8, “Importing CSV files with Cypher” on how to import data from CSV files.

Updating very large amounts of data (e.g. when importing) with a single Cypher query may fail due to memory constraints. For these situations only, Cypher provides the global USING PERIODIC COMMIT query hint for updating queries.

Periodic Commit will process the rows until the number of rows reaches a limit. Then the current transaction will be committed and replaced with a newly opened transaction. If no limit is set, a default value will be used.

See the section called “Importing large amounts of data” in Section 10.6, “Load CSV” for examples of USING PERIODIC COMMIT with and without setting the number of rows per commit.

Important Using periodic commit will prevent running out of memory when updating large amounts of data. However it will also break transactional isolation thus it should only be used where needed.