spring - why does transaction roll back on RuntimeException but not SQLException

Question

I have a Spring-managed service method to manage database inserts. It contains multiple insert statements.

@Transactional
public void insertObservation(ObservationWithData ob) throws SQLException 
{
    observationDao.insertObservation(ob.getObservation());
            // aop pointcut inserted here in unit test
    dataDao.insertData(ob.getData());
}

I have two unit tests which throw an exception before calling the second insert. If the exception is a RuntimeException, the transaction is rolled back. If the exception is a SQLException, the first insert is persisted.

I'm baffled. Can anyone tell me why the transaction does not roll back on a SQLException? Can anyone offer a suggestion how to manage this? I could catch the SQLException and throw a RuntimeException, but that just seems weird.

Answer 1

This is defined behaviour. From the docs:

Any RuntimeException triggers rollback, and any checked Exception does not.

This is common behaviour across all Spring transaction APIs. By default, if a RuntimeException is thrown from within the transactional code, the transaction will be rolled back. If a checked exception (i.e. not a RuntimeException) is thrown, then the transaction will not be rolled back.

The rationale behind this is that RuntimeException classes are generally taken by Spring to denote unrecoverable error conditions.

This behaviour can be changed from the default, if you wish to do so, but how to do this depends on how you use the Spring API, and how you set up your transaction manager.