What's the best practice to ensure atomic read of a database table using JDBC?

Question

I have an java application reading from a database table for jobs to process, and I may have multiple instances of this application running on different servers as each job is i

Answer 1

Lock the table using whatever mechanism is supported by your database server.

For example, in Postgres it would be:

LOCK yourtable;

And it's your table for the duration of the transaction.

Other databases will have something similar.