Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v2.1.1 Developer's Guide

Flat Transactions

The Enterprise JavaBeans Specification, v3.0 requires support for flat (as opposed to nested) transactions. In a flat transaction, each transaction is decoupled from and independent of other transactions in the system. Another transaction cannot start in the same thread until the current transaction ends.

Flat transactions are the most prevalent model and are supported by most commercial database systems. Although nested transactions offer a finer granularity of control over transactions, they are supported by far fewer commercial database systems.