How to know if a Neo4j background job completed successfully?

Question

I'm using Neo4j. For large data imports from external csvs, parquets, etc. there is a very handful command for "fire and forget", the apoc.periodic.submit. There is also the apoc.periodic.list that list the background jobs.

During the execution of the background job it appears in the output of apoc.periodic.list. But after it finishes, either by an error or by a successful execution, it will disappear from this list without any feedback from the completion status.

Is there a general way to check if a background job finish status? Is there a more suitable API for my purposes?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66048555/how-to-know-if-a-neo4j-background-job-completed-successfully

Answer 1

If there is a way to directly check error status on the fire&forget routines, I don't see it in the documentation (they are fire&forget, so it comes with the territory?)

Ideas

• don't background the query itself, background a process/task that waits for a blocking Cypher execution to finish and capture the error code...
• check for success instead of failure? (if it didn't succeed you know it failed right?), this may be evident based on what the Cypher does, or you could add a graph content update for this purpose. E.g. Update property on a NODE with last_updated. Do that last so that if the cypher fails, the property is not updated
• You could enable query log and then check there to see what happened, most likely this query has a unique signature and the last execution could be found easily in the log (with status/error code)