Book excerpt: Understanding how transaction management works in Java and developing an effective transaction design strategy can help to avoid data integrity problems in your applications and databases and ease the pain of inevitable system failures. This book is about how to design an effective transaction management strategy using the transaction models provided by Java-based frameworks such as EJB and Spring. Techniques, best practices, and pitfalls with each transaction model will be described. In addition, transaction design patterns will bring all these concepts and techniques together and describe how to use these models to effectively manage transactions within your EJB or Spring-based Java applications. The book covers: - The local transaction model - The programmatic transaction model - The declarative transaction model - XA Transaction Processing - Transaction Design Patterns