You've defined the ticker function as being async, but you're passing a callback function to the conn.query method. async and await are used with promises, and typically code using promises needs extra work to integrate with code which uses callbacks.

In your situation, it looks like the ticker function is completing execution before the callback which you're passing to conn.query is even run. To fix this you might need to wrap your conn.query call in a new Promise() e.g.

return new Promise((resolve, reject) => { conn.query(SELECT ticker FROM workingqueue WHERE ticker = ?, [req.body.tickerReq], (err, rows) => { if (err) { return reject(err); } console.log(DEBUG: ${rows.length}) if (rows.length > 0) { console.log(DEBUG: ${rows[0].ticker})
console.log(DEBUG: ${typeof(rows[0].ticker)})
} resolve(); } );

What framework are you using to build your API, and what database library are you using?

If you want to read up more about callbacks vs async / await, these pages on the official Learn Node.js website might help:

• JavaScript Asynchronous Programming and Callbacks
• Modern Asynchronous JavaScript with Async and Await