MyBatis’ Alternative Transaction Management

On the jOOQ user group, we’re often being asked how to perform transaction management with jOOQ. And we have an easy answer ready: You don’t do that with jOOQ. You choose your favourite transaction management API, be it:

• JDBC
• Spring
• JEE JTA (e.g. as supported by Weblogic)
• Bitronix TM
• Hibernate

And the above list is far from being exhaustive. Transaction management is something very delicate, and it certainly should not be imposed by a library whose main purpose is not transaction management, because any such library / framework will provide you with at most a very leaky abstraction of its transaction model. In other words, if you just slightly want to deviate from “the standard” model (e.g. as imposed by Hibernate), you will suffer greatly, as soon as you want to run 2-3 queries outside of Hibernate – e.g. batch or reporting statements through jOOQ.

MyBatis’ Alternative Transaction Management

MyBatis is a SQL templating engine that provides a couple of features on top of alternative templating engines, such as Velocity, or StringTemplate. One of these features built on top of templating is precisely transaction management, as can be seen in the docs.

From what we can read in the docs, it looks as though MyBatis’ transaction managers can be overriden by Spring, for instance. However, it is not easy to see how this is done. In fact, given that MyBatis also solves Connection pooling (for which there are also very viable alternatives, such as c3p0 and DBCP), and mapping (which could be solved more easily with custom transformers, such as offered by Spring’s JdbcTemplate, or jOOQ’s RecordMapper).

As many frameworks, MyBatis tries to solve problems outside its core scope, which is SQL templating. While this may be a good thing as you only rely on a single dependency, it is also quite a lock-in, in case you have a more complex model. In the case of transaction management, we believe that this was not a good idea by MyBatis.

Thoughts from MyBatis users?