A database transaction is a sequence of actions that are treated as a single unit of work. These actions should either complete entirely or take no effect at all. Transaction management is an important part of RDBMS-oriented enterprise application to ensure data integrity and consistency. The concept of transactions can be described with the following four key properties described as ACID −

• Atomicity − A transaction should be treated as a single unit of operation, which means either the entire sequence of operations is successful or unsuccessful.

• Consistency − This represents the consistency of the referential integrity of the database, unique primary keys in tables, etc.

• Isolation − There may be many transaction processing with the same data set at the same time. Each transaction should be isolated from others to prevent data corruption.

• Durability − Once a transaction has completed, the results of this transaction have to be made permanent and cannot be erased from the database due to system failure.

A real RDBMS database system will guarantee all four properties for each transaction. The simplistic view of a transaction issued to the database using SQL is as follows −

• Begin the transaction using begin transaction command.

• Perform various deleted, update or insert operations using SQL queries.

• If all the operation are successful then perform commit otherwise rollback all the operations.

Spring framework provides an abstract layer on top of different underlying transaction management APIs. Spring”s transaction support aims to provide an alternative to EJB transactions by adding transaction capabilities to POJOs. Spring supports both programmatic and declarative transaction management. EJBs require an application server, but Spring transaction management can be implemented without the need of an application server.

Local vs. Global Transactions

Local transactions are specific to a single transactional resource like a JDBC connection, whereas global transactions can span multiple transactional resources like transaction in a distributed system.

Local transaction management can be useful in a centralized computing environment where application components and resources are located at a single site, and transaction management only involves a local data manager running on a single machine. Local transactions are easier to be implemented.

Global transaction management is required in a distributed computing environment where all the resources are distributed across multiple systems. In such a case, transaction management needs to be done both at local and global levels. A distributed or a global transaction is executed across multiple systems, and its execution requires coordination between the global transaction management system and all the local data managers of all the involved systems.

Programmatic vs. Declarative

Spring supports two types of transaction management −

• Programmatic transaction management − This means that you have to manage the transaction with the help of programming. That gives you extreme flexibility, but it is difficult to maintain.

• Declarative transaction management − This means you separate transaction management from the business code. You only use annotations or XML-based configuration to manage the transactions.

Declarative transaction management is preferable over programmatic transaction management though it is less flexible than programmatic transaction management, which allows you to control transactions through your code. But as a kind of crosscutting concern, declarative transaction management can be modularized with the AOP approach. Spring supports declarative transaction management through the Spring AOP framework.

Spring Transaction Abstractions

The key to the Spring transaction abstraction is defined by the org.springframework.transaction.PlatformTransactionManager interface, which is as follows −

public interface PlatformTransactionManager {
   TransactionStatus getTransaction(TransactionDefinition definition);
   throws TransactionException;
   
   void commit(TransactionStatus status) throws TransactionException;
   void rollback(TransactionStatus status) throws TransactionException;
}

The TransactionDefinition is the core interface of the transaction support in Spring and it is defined as follows −

public interface TransactionDefinition {
   int getPropagationBehavior();
   int getIsolationLevel();
   String getName();
   int getTimeout();
   boolean isReadOnly();
}

Following are the possible values for isolation level −

Following are the possible values for propagation types −

The TransactionStatus interface provides a simple way for transactional code to control transaction execution and query transaction status.

public interface TransactionStatus extends SavepointManager {
   boolean isNewTransaction();
   boolean hasSavepoint();
   void setRollbackOnly();
   boolean isRollbackOnly();
   boolean isCompleted();
}