Transactional Operations with JPA Explained: What happens under the hood
Introduction
Most of us have come across this powerful annotation called transactional, and most of us are actually unaware of how this annotations works exactly. In this post I have attempted to break down the process and explicate it using the very basic lingo.
Lets connect the dots now.
The @Transactional annotation in Spring Boot is used to mark a method or a class as transactional. A transaction is a unit of work that is executed on a database, and the @Transactional annotation ensures that all database operations within the marked method or class are executed in a single transaction.
Imagine that you are building an application to manage a bank’s accounts and transactions. You want to use the @Transactional annotation to automatically manage the transactions for you so that you don't have to manually handle the transactions.
When you use the @Transactional annotation, the transaction manager creates a proxy object for each of the objects that are part of the transaction. For example, if you are performing a transaction that involves updating multiple accounts, the transaction manager might create proxy objects for each of those accounts.
The proxy objects have the same methods as the original objects, but they also have additional behavior that allows them to manage the transactions. When you call a method on one of the proxy objects, the proxy is responsible for starting a new transaction or using an existing transaction, depending on the configuration of the @Transactional annotation.
When you call the method to transfer the money, the proxy objects would intercept the call and start a new transaction. They would then perform the necessary operations to update the accounts, such as decreasing the balance on one account and increasing the balance on the other.
If everything goes as planned, the proxy objects will commit the transaction, saving the changes to the database. However, if something goes wrong during the transaction, the proxy objects can automatically rolls back the transaction, restoring the accounts to their previous state.
This is just one example of how the transaction manager can create proxy objects to manage transactions in a real-life scenario. I hope this helps to give you a better understanding of how the @Transactional the annotation works under the hood!
Conclusion
In conclusion, Transactional Annotation is a powerful mechanism that allows for efficient and accurate data management. It streamlines the process of annotating and managing large sets of data by providing a way to organize and track changes made to the data. If you’re looking to improve your data management process, consider implementing Transactional Annotation in your workflow.
