When using a JPA implementation such as DataNucleus in a J2SE environment, the Transactions are known as Locally Managed Transactions . The users code will manage the transactions by starting, and commiting the transaction itself. With these transactions with JPA you would do something like

EntityManager em = emf.getEntityManager();
EntityTransaction tx = em.getTransaction();
try
{
    tx.begin();
    
    {users code to persist objects}
    
    tx.commit();
}
finally
{
    if (tx.isActive())
    {
        tx.rollback();
    }
}
em.close();

When you use a framework like Spring you would not need to specify the tx.begin(), tx.commit(), tx.rollback() since that would be done for you. The basic idea with Locally Managed transactions is that you are managing the transaction start and end.

When using a J2EE container you are giving over control of the transactions to the container. Here you have Container Managed Transactions . In terms of your code, you would do like the previous example except that you would OMIT the tx.begin(), tx.commit(), tx.rollback() since the J2EE container will be doing this for you.

DataNucleus also allows specification of the transaction isolation level. This is specified via the EntityManagerFactory property datanucleus.transactionIsolation . It accepts the standard JDBC values of

• read-uncommitted (1) : dirty reads, non-repeatable reads and phantom reads can occur
• read-committed (2) : dirty reads are prevented; non-repeatable reads and phantom reads can occur
• repeatable-read (4) : dirty reads and non-repeatable reads are prevented; phantom reads can occur
• serializable (8) : dirty reads, non-repeatable reads and phantom reads are prevented

The default is read-committed . If the datastore doesn't support a particular isolation level then it will silently be changed to one that is supported (for example DB4O only supports read-committed so will always use that). As an alternative you can also specify it on a per-transaction basis as follows (using the values in parentheses above).

org.datanucleus.jpa.EntityTransactionImpl tx = 
                    (org.datanucleus.jpa.EntityTransactionImpl)pm.currentTransaction();
tx.setOption("transaction.isolation", 2);