Chapter 11. Transactions and Concurrency

The most important point about Hibernate and concurrency control is that it is easy to understand. Hibernate directly uses JDBC connections and JTA resources without adding any additional locking behavior. It is recommended that you spend some time with the JDBC, ANSI, and transaction isolation specification of your database management system.

Hibernate does not lock objects in memory. Your application can expect the behavior as defined by the isolation level of your database transactions. Through Session, which is also a transaction-scoped cache, Hibernate provides repeatable reads for lookup by identifier and entity queries and not reporting queries that return scalar values.

In addition to versioning for automatic optimistic concurrency control, Hibernate also offers, using the SELECT FOR UPDATE syntax, a (minor) API for pessimistic locking of rows. Optimistic concurrency control and this API are discussed later in this chapter.

The discussion of concurrency control in Hibernate begins with the granularity of Configuration, SessionFactory, and Session, as well as database transactions and long conversations.