Exceptions thrown by Hibernate are unchecked and from what I’ve read elsewhere it seems that they are not supposed to be caught in code. However, this means that when for example a temporary database error occurs, the thread in which it occurred dies and our application becomes unresponsive. How should it be done?
Example exceptions that occur:
javax.persistence.PersistenceException
Caused by: org.hibernate.exception.GenericJDBCException: could not insert
Caused by: java.sql.SQLException: Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction
This happens when the application has been running for hours or days.
Much of what I’ve read talks about how to use Hibernate when integrated into Spring or something similar. Thus, each web request starts a new thread and if that thread dies it only affects that one web request. But in the case of a standalone Java application, how should we deal with it?
There is nothing wrong with catching a RuntimeException. It being unchecked is just to give you the option not to.
If you have a specific strategy in mind for handling the exception (like trying again, or triggering something else in your app logic), by all means catch it!