2.1.8 Transaction Isolation Levels

If a DBMS supports transaction processing, it will have some way of managing potential conflicts that can arise when two transactions are operating on a database at the same time. A user can specify a transaction isolation level to indicate what level of care the DBMS should exercise in resolving potential conflicts. For example, what happens when one transaction changes a value and a second transaction reads that value before the change has been committed or rolled back? Should that be allowed, given that the changed value read by the second transaction will be invalid if the first transaction is rolled back? An application can instruct the DBMS to allow a value to be read before it has been committed (a "dirty read") with the following code, where con is the current connection:
con.setTransactionIsolation(TRANSACTION_READ_UNCOMMITTED);
The higher the transaction isolation level, the more care is taken to avoid conflicts. The Connection interface defines five levels, with the lowest specifying that transactions are not supported at all and the highest specifying that while one transaction is operating on a database, no other transactions may make any changes to the data read by that transaction.

TRANSACTION_READ_UNCOMMITTED, used in the previous example, is one level up from the lowest level. Typically, the higher the level of isolation, the slower the application executes (due to increased locking overhead and decreased concurrency between users). The developer must balance the need for performance with the need for data consistency when making a decision about what isolation level to use. Of course, the level that can actually be supported depends on the capabilities of the underlying DBMS.

When a new Connection object is created, its transaction isolation level depends on the driver, but normally it is the default for the underlying data source. A user may call the method setTransactionIsolation to change the transaction isolation level, and the new level will be in effect for the rest of the connection session. To change the transaction isolation level for just one transaction, one needs to set it before executing any statements in the transaction and then reset it after the transaction terminates. If the transaction isolation level is changed during a transaction, the result depends on how the DBMS and driver are implemented.