Question

According to JAVA documentation, Connection#commit() can throw SQLException. My question is whether or not a rollback should still be issued in this scenario.

For example:

Connection con = null;
try {
    // assume this method returns an opened connection with setAutoCommit(false)
    con = createConnection(); 

    // do DB stuff

    con.commit();
} catch (SQLException e) {
    if (con != null) {
        // what if con.commit() failed, is this still necessary,
        // will it hurt anything?
        con.rollback();
    }
} finally {
    if (con != null) {
        con.close();
    }
}

I actually wrapped the con.rollback() call into another method which ignores any exceptions thrown by it, so I think I’m ok here. I just wondered if this was the best way of handling things.

Answer 1

I would do explicit rollback just for clean-up purposes. Although changes won’t be persisted in db either way, it seems nice to explicitly let database know that you’re done here. Just like the way you close connection explicitly, without waiting for Connection object to be garbage-collected.

This is, obviously, not a technical answer and I would also be interested to learn whether there’s a practical point in doing so.