Distributed Transactions with Atomikos

Overview

This personal project explores distributed transaction management using JTA and Atomikos within a Spring Boot application. The primary goal was to gain hands-on experience with coordinating transactions across multiple heterogeneous databases, specifically MySQL and PostgreSQL, in a single application context.

Distributed Transaction Management

The core of the project revolves around configuring Atomikos as the JTA transaction manager to coordinate two-phase commits across MySQL and PostgreSQL data sources. This setup demonstrates how to maintain data consistency when writes must succeed or fail atomically across different database engines. Hibernate serves as the ORM layer, with careful configuration to support the distributed transaction requirements of each data source.

Persistence Optimization

Beyond transaction coordination, the project includes practical explorations of persistence optimization techniques. Batched insert strategies were implemented and compared to understand their impact on throughput when writing large volumes of data. Additionally, a comparison between keyset-based and offset-based pagination approaches was conducted to evaluate their performance characteristics under different query patterns and dataset sizes.

Inspiration

The project draws heavily from the patterns and techniques presented in Vlad Mihalcea’s High-Performance Java Persistence, applying those concepts in a distributed transaction context to deepen understanding of both JPA/Hibernate internals and cross-database transaction coordination.

Outcome

The result is a reference implementation that demonstrates practical distributed transaction patterns, persistence optimization strategies, and pagination techniques applicable to real-world enterprise applications.