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11.5. Pessimistic Locking

11.5.1. About Pessimistic Locking

It is not intended that users spend much time worrying about locking strategies. It is usually enough to specify an isolation level for the JDBC connections and then simply let the database do all the work. However, advanced users may wish to obtain exclusive pessimistic locks or re-obtain locks at the start of a new transaction.
Hibernate will always use the locking mechanism of the database; it never lock objects in memory.
The LockMode class defines the different lock levels that can be acquired by Hibernate. A lock is obtained by the following mechanisms:
  • LockMode.WRITE is acquired automatically when Hibernate updates or inserts a row.
  • LockMode.UPGRADE can be acquired upon explicit user request using SELECT ... FOR UPDATE on databases which support that syntax.
  • LockMode.UPGRADE_NOWAIT can be acquired upon explicit user request using a SELECT ... FOR UPDATE NOWAIT under Oracle.
  • LockMode.READ is acquired automatically when Hibernate reads data under Repeatable Read or Serializable isolation level. It can be re-acquired by explicit user request.
  • LockMode.NONE represents the absence of a lock. All objects switch to this lock mode at the end of a Transaction. Objects associated with the session via a call to update() or saveOrUpdate() also start out in this lock mode.
The "explicit user request" is expressed in one of the following ways:
  • A call to Session.load(), specifying a LockMode.
  • A call to Session.lock().
  • A call to Query.setLockMode().
If Session.load() is called with UPGRADE or UPGRADE_NOWAIT, and the requested object was not yet loaded by the session, the object is loaded using SELECT ... FOR UPDATE. If load() is called for an object that is already loaded with a less restrictive lock than the one requested, Hibernate calls lock() for that object.
Session.lock() performs a version number check if the specified lock mode is READ, UPGRADE or UPGRADE_NOWAIT. In the case of UPGRADE or UPGRADE_NOWAIT, SELECT ... FOR UPDATE is used.
If the requested lock mode is not supported by the database, Hibernate uses an appropriate alternate mode instead of throwing an exception. This ensures that applications are portable.
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11.5.2. Connection Release Modes

One of the legacies of Hibernate 2.x JDBC connection management meant that a Session would obtain a connection when it was first required and then maintain that connection until the session was closed. Hibernate 3.x introduced the notion of connection release modes that would instruct a session how to handle its JDBC connections. The following discussion is pertinent only to connections provided through a configured ConnectionProvider. User-supplied connections are outside the breadth of this discussion. The different release modes are identified by the enumerated values of org.hibernate.ConnectionReleaseMode:
  • ON_CLOSE: is the legacy behavior described above. The Hibernate session obtains a connection when it first needs to perform some JDBC access and maintains that connection until the session is closed.
  • AFTER_TRANSACTION: releases connections after a org.hibernate.Transaction has been completed.
  • AFTER_STATEMENT (also referred to as aggressive release): releases connections after every statement execution. This aggressive releasing is skipped if that statement leaves open resources associated with the given session. Currently the only situation where this occurs is through the use of org.hibernate.ScrollableResults.
The configuration parameter hibernate.connection.release_mode is used to specify which release mode to use. The possible values are as follows:
  • auto (the default): this choice delegates to the release mode returned by the org.hibernate.transaction.TransactionFactory.getDefaultReleaseMode() method. For JTATransactionFactory, this returns ConnectionReleaseMode.AFTER_STATEMENT; for JDBCTransactionFactory, this returns ConnectionReleaseMode.AFTER_TRANSACTION. Do not change this default behavior as failures due to the value of this setting tend to indicate bugs and/or invalid assumptions in user code.
  • on_close: uses ConnectionReleaseMode.ON_CLOSE. This setting is left for backwards compatibility, but its use is discouraged.
  • after_transaction: uses ConnectionReleaseMode.AFTER_TRANSACTION. This setting should not be used in JTA environments. Also note that with ConnectionReleaseMode.AFTER_TRANSACTION, if a session is considered to be in auto-commit mode, connections will be released as if the release mode were AFTER_STATEMENT.
  • after_statement: uses ConnectionReleaseMode.AFTER_STATEMENT. Additionally, the configured ConnectionProvider is consulted to see if it supports this setting (supportsAggressiveRelease()). If not, the release mode is reset to ConnectionReleaseMode.AFTER_TRANSACTION. This setting is only safe in environments where we can either re-acquire the same underlying JDBC connection each time you make a call into ConnectionProvider.getConnection() or in auto-commit environments where it does not matter if we re-establish the same connection.
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