Read-Only transactions with Spring and Hibernate

Spring supports the concept of read-only transactions. Because Spring doesn't provide persistence functionality itself, the semantics of read-only transactions depend on the underlying persistence framework used along with Spring.

I use Spring with Hibernate and Oracle, and when I looked to understand the semantics of read-only transactions on this specific configuration, I found that there was very little information on the web. The existing information is scarce and not very clear, and as a result I had to do some research myself, which included hacking into Spring and Hibernate's source code. Not that I don't enjoy spending a few late hours reading good code, but so that you don't have to do it yourself, here is what I found.

Spring

Spring's documentation doesn't say almost anything about what a read-only transaction really means. The best information I could find was:

Read-only status: a read-only transaction does not modify any data. Read-only transactions can be a useful optimization in some cases (such as when using Hibernate).

That's basically all it says. Google and a little hacking shed some light on the real meaning of the sentence above: if the transaction is marked as read-only, Spring will set the Hibernate Session's flush mode to FLUSH_NEVER, and will set the JDBC transaction to read-only. Now lets understand what it means and what are the implications in a Hibernate/Oracle setup.

Hibernate

Hibernate doesn't have the concept of read-only sessions. But when a session's flush mode is set to FLUSH_NEVER, which is what Spring does, two interesting things happen. First, running HQL queries no longer cause Hibernate to flush the session state to the database, which can provide a dramatic performance improvement. Secondly, Hibernate will not flush the changes before commiting the transaction. But the user can still call Session.flush() by hand, causing any modifications to be persisted to database. This is where Spring's call to Connection.setReadOnly() comes handy.

Oracle

When using the Oracle JDBC driver, calling connection.setReadOnly(true) translates into the statement "SET TRANSACTION READ ONLY". This statement limits the types of SQL statements that can be executed during the transaction. Only SELECTS (without 'FOR UPDATE') and a few other statements can be executed. Specifically, no UPDATEs, DELETEs, INSERTs or MERGEs can be executed. This behavior is Oracle-specific. Other RDBMS can have different semantics for read only transactions or simply not support it at all.

By setting the JDBC connection to read-only, Spring prevents a distracted user from persisting changes by flushing the Hibernate session to the database.

Notes

As we saw, with the two measures taken by Spring, the transaction is guaranteed to be read-only through the JDBC connection, and performance improvements are obtained by setting the Hibernate session to FLUSH_NEVER.

There is one thing that doesn't happen, though. Even during Spring read-only transactions, Hibernate queries still save the state of persistent objects in the session cache. In theory it wouldn't be necessary, since this state is used to detect modifications during session flushes. Depeding on the size and number of objects it can make a huge difference in terms of memory usage.

If you still want to prevent Hibernate from saving the object state in the session cache, you have to manually run the HQL queries in read-only mode. It would be a nice improvement to Hibernate to have a read-only mode to the session so that no object state is stored and no flush executed.