9.5. Summary

Transaction management is a key part of job robustness and reliability. Because errors happen, you need to know how Spring Batch handles transactions, figure out when a failure can corrupt data, and learn to use appropriate settings. Remember the following about transaction management in batch applications, and don’t hesitate to go back to the corresponding sections for more details:

• Spring Batch handles transactions at the step level. A tasklet is transactional; Spring Batch creates and commits a transaction for each chunk in a chunk-oriented step.

• Be careful with declarative transaction management (with XML or the Transactional annotation); it can interfere with Spring Batch and produce unexpected results.

• When a batch application interacts with more than one transactional resource and these interactions must be globally coordinated, use JTA or one of the patterns we’ve discussed.

• JTA is a bulletproof solution for global transactions, but it can be complex to set up and adds overhead.

• The alternative techniques for handling global transactions without JTA work only in specific contexts and can add extra logic to the application.