Hibernate version: 2.1.4

Name and version of the database you are using:Oracle 9i

I would like to know if there is any benefit of not using Transaction in Session for read-only queries (Session still managed by Hibernate, not JDBC), since it seems to work. Does Transaction mean any unnecessary overhead? Is there any risk of not using it in select-only use case?

Thanks

AJR

99% of the time you can get away without doing it but there is virtually no overhead in wrapping with a transaction. I have had funny bugs/behaviour when not using the transaction under certain combos of DB/JDBC driver/connection pool so I would say wrap everything with a transaction to be on the safe side.

Oracle in particular can be a bit funny when doing things without a proper transaction, you find after a while it errors complaining about too many cursors open or something similar.

Thanks a lot, that was the exact explanation I was looking for.

i will add that not managing explicitly the transactions is worst for performance.

We had an example app where development team "forgot" to call begin and commit (for huge queries), the stress tests were not good.

We reworked all this to have a nice transaction management (via hibernate transaction api) for these "read only" queries, the performance was really really better.