You Don’t Need @Transactional Everywhere in Spring Boot — Here’s Why

Using @Transactional everywhere in a Spring Boot application is a common anti-pattern. While transactions are essential for ensuring data consistency and rollback behavior, overusing @Transactional can lead to performance issues, unexpected behavior, and unnecessary complexity.

Here’s a breakdown of when you should and shouldn’t use @Transactional:

🚫 The Problem: Overusing @Transactional

Many developers tend to annotate every service method with @Transactional, assuming it’s necessary for anything involving the database.

But in reality:

• It adds unnecessary overhead.
• It can cause confusion about transaction boundaries.
• It may hide design issues, like mixing read and write concerns.

✅ When You Should Use @Transactional

1. Multiple Write Operations on the Database

• When you have more than one INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE that should succeed or fail together. If you’re performing multiple operations that need to succeed or fail together, use @Transactional.

@Transactional
public void transferMoney(Long fromAccountId, Long toAccountId, BigDecimal amount) {
    accountRepository.debit(fromAccountId, amount);
    accountRepository.credit(toAccountId, amount);
}