terminate-tx.asciidoc

Terminating a running transaction

Sometimes you may want to terminate (abort) a long running transaction from another thread.

Tip	The source code used in this example is found here: TerminateTransactions.java

To begin with, we start the database server:

component=neo4j-examples
source=org/neo4j/examples/TerminateTransactions.java
classifier=sources
tag=startDb

Now we start creating an infinite binary tree of nodes in the database, as an example of a long running transaction.

component=neo4j-examples
source=org/neo4j/examples/TerminateTransactions.java
classifier=sources
tag=mkTree

After waiting for some time, we decide to terminate the transaction. This is done from a separate thread.

component=neo4j-examples
source=org/neo4j/examples/TerminateTransactions.java
classifier=sources
tag=terminateTx

Running this will execute the long running transaction for about one second and prints the maximum depth of the tree that was created before the transaction was terminated. No changes are actually made to the data — because the transaction has been terminated, the end result is as if no operations were performed.

Example output

terminate-tx-java-result.asciidoc

Finally, let’s shut down the database again.

component=neo4j-examples
source=org/neo4j/examples/TerminateTransactions.java
classifier=sources
tag=shutdownDb