How to start a transaction in JDBC?

Question

Connection.setTransactionIsolation(int) warns:

Note: If this method is called during a transaction, the result is implementation-defined.

Answer 1

JDBC implicitly demarcates each query/update you perform on the connection with a transaction. You can customize this behavior by calling setAutoCommit(false) to turn off the auto-commit mode and call the commit()/rollback() to indicate the end of a transaction. Pesudo code

try
{
  con.setAutoCommit(false);

   //1 or more queries or updates

   con.commit();
}
catch(Exception e)
{
   con.rollback();
}
finally
{
   con.close();
}

Now, there is a type in the method you have shown. It should be setTransactionIsolation(int level) and is not the api for transaction demarcation. It manages how/when the changes made by one operation become visible to other concurrent operations, the "I" in ACID (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_(database_systems))