firstly please excuse my relative inexperience with Hibernate I’ve only really been using it in fairly standard cases, and certainly never in a scenario where I had to manage the primary key’s (@Id) myself, which is where I believe my problems lies.
Outline: I’m bulk-loading facebook profile information through FB’s batch API’s and need to mirror this information in a local database, all of which is fine, but runs into trouble when I attempt to do it in parallel.
Imagine a message queue processing batches of friend data in parallel and lots of the same shared Likes and References (between the friends), and that’s where my problem lies.
I run into repeated Hibernate ConstraintViolationException’s which are due to duplicate PK entries – as one transaction has tried to flush it’s session after determining an entity as transient when in fact another transaction has already made the same determination and beaten the first to committing, resulting in the below:
Duplicate entry '121528734903' for key 'PRIMARY'
And the ConstraintViolationException being raised.
I’ve managed to just about overcome this by removing all cascading from the parent entity, and performing atomic writes, one record per-transaction and trying to essentially just catching any exceptions, ignoring them if they do occur as I’d know that another transaction had already done the job, but I’m not very happy with this solution and cant imagine it’s the most efficient use of hibernate.
I’d welcome any suggestions as to how I could improve the architecture…
Currently using : Hibernate 3.5.6 / Spring 3.1 / MySQL 5.1.30
Addendum: at the moment I’m using a hibernate merge() which checks initially for the existence of a row and will either merge (update) or insert dependant on existence, problem is even with an isolation level of READ_UNCOMMITTED sometimes the wrong determination is made, i.e. two transactions decide the same, and I’ve got an exception again.
Locking doesn’t really help me either, optimistic or pessimistic as the condition is only a problem in the initial insert case and there’s no row to lock, making it very difficult to handle concurrency…
I must be missing something but I’ve done the reading, my worry is that not being able to leave hibernate to manage PK’s i’m kinda scuppered – as it checks for existence to early in the session and come time to synchronise the session state is invalid.
Anyone with any suggestion for me..? thanks.
Take this with a large grain of salt as I know very little about Hibernate, but it sounds like what you need to do is specify that the default mysql INSERT statement is instead made an INSERT IGNORE statement. You might want to take a look at @SQLInsert in Hibernate, I believe that’s where you would need to specify the exact insert statement that should be used. I’m sorry I can’t help with the syntax, but I think you can probably find what you need by looking at the Hibernate documentation for @SQLInsert and if necessary the MySQL documentation for INSERT IGNORE.