Use the APOC apoc.periodic.iterate procedure in Neo4j for large-scale batch graph mutations without memory exhaustion

Steps

1. Install APOC Core plugin and confirm availability: CALL apoc.help('periodic.iterate') YIELD name, text RETURN name, text
2. Call apoc.periodic.iterate with a data-fetching Cypher as the first argument and a mutation Cypher as the second, passing batchSize to control commit frequency: CALL apoc.periodic.iterate('MATCH (n:OldNode) RETURN n', 'SET n:NewLabel REMOVE n:OldNode', {batchSize: 1000, parallel: false})
3. Use parallel: true only when the mutation Cypher operates on disjoint node sets to avoid deadlocks; for connected graph mutations keep parallel: false
4. Capture the return value to check for errors: YIELD batches, total, timeTaken, committedOperations, failedOperations, errorMessages
5. For very large graphs set iterateList: true (default) to pass a batch list to the inner query rather than re-running the outer query per batch, which reduces planning overhead
6. Monitor progress by periodically running CALL apoc.periodic.list() to see running jobs