Hibernating with WebSphere and a non-journaling DB2/400 system

A few years ago, I worked as a consultant at a company that used DB2/400 as its main database platform.  The company did not have journaling ‘turned on’ so their database platform did not support transactions/commit control.  This did seem odd to me, but what I’ve found is that its pretty common that DB2/400 shops don’t use this feature. While this seemed like a mere oddity and an inconvenience for commit control, it actually caused a more measurable issue which was that we couldn’t use Hibernate, one of, if not the most common ORM framework. Hibernate requires transactions. This is a problem for anyone wanting to use a non-journaled DB2/400 instance… in particular me.