The underlying problem I want to solve is running a task that generates several temporary tables in MySQL, which need to stay around long enough to fetch results from Java after they are created. Because of the size of the data involved, the task must be completed in batches. Each batch is a call to a stored procedure called through JDBC. The entire process can take half an hour or more for a large data set.

To ensure access to the temporary tables, I run the entire task, start to finish, in a single Spring transaction with a TransactionCallbackWithoutResult. Otherwise, I could get a different connection that does not have access to the temporary tables (this would happen occasionally before I wrapped everything in a transaction).

This worked fine in my development environment. However, in production I got the following exception:

java.sql.SQLException: Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

This happened when a different task tried to access some of the same tables during the execution of my long running transaction. What confuses me is that the long running transaction only inserts or updates into temporary tables. All access to non-temporary tables are selects only. From what documentation I can find, the default Spring transaction isolation level should not cause MySQL to block in this case.

So my first question, is this the right approach? Can I ensure that I repeatedly get the same connection through a Hibernate template without a long running transaction?

If the long running transaction approach is the correct one, what should I check in terms of isolation levels? Is my understanding correct that the default isolation level in Spring/MySQL transactions should not lock tables that are only accessed through selects? What can I do to debug which tables are causing the conflict, and prevent those tables from being locked by the transaction?