Transaction Timeout

[psodagam]

We are using JTA transaction implementation of JBoss in conjunction with Spring for transaction management. The TransactionManager is not throwing an exception when there is a timeout. Instead it just waits for the SQL completion, rollbacks the transaction, makes it inactive. But it does logs a warning message :).

15:33:24,593 WARN [TransactionImpl] Transaction TransactionImpl:XidImpl[FormatId=257, GlobalId=uoponlsodagam/53, Bran
chQual=, localId=53] timed out. status=STATUS_ACTIVE

Spring does throw an exception when it finds the transaction is inactive when we try to execute another SQL statement in the same call.

Is there a reason for TransactionManager to not cancel any running operations and throw an exception on timeout? The worst case if there are any database blocks, a sql statement executing in the transaction stays active for ever, and executing thread waits in the control of the TransactionManager for that period time.

I am not able to see any valid reason for this pattern whether the transactions are used with EJB, JMS, or JDBC. I am just throwing this out there to community to see if others have same opinion or disagreements.

[marklittle]

Which TM are you using? The old TM or JBossTS?

Why should it throw an exception and to whom?

The JTA and OTS simply say that if a transaction timeout goes off the transaction will be rolled back automatically. Most of the industry TMs I've come across over the years handle this with a separate thread by either marking the transaction as rollback-only at that point (the old TM) and waiting until the thread which created the transaction tries to terminate the transaction (and then forcing a roll back), or (the more common case) have the thread run periodically and do a rollback on the tx when the timeout expires.

Are you expecting the act of rollback to go round and interrupt the thread that was associated with the TM?