Is this considered a 'best practice' for some reason? Why would this be? Example:

Transaction tx = session.beginTransaction();
List blahList = session.find("from Blah");
tx.commit();

Not sure why I would 'need' to do this, but lots of examples in the manual do it this way. If I do have to do this for some reason, do I also need to rollback() if I catch an exception?

Thanks!

One rule: always use transaction, yes it is a best practice.

i think most of us have made the same mistake but always use transaction even for read-only access

Ok, Thanks for the reply, I will just 'believe you(!) and keep doing it. :)

But is there any place you or anyone can point me with an explanation as to exactly why this is a good practice? Something that perhaps would give me a clue as to what is going on that would make this necessary or desirable? Is it possible that this has to do with cache consistency or something like that? If I ask for an object but there is some kind of error populating it and it is only partially retrieved, does it put the cache in some sort of invalid state if I don't use the transaction? Just a guess...perhaps I am way ahead of myself here.

Thanks in advance.

It has been discussed numerous times on that forum, just search for it. Basically there is no such thing as "no transaction". You will always have a transaction, the question is just where it is demarcated.