When you want to rollback a TX with Spring TX you need to throw a runtime exception. It would be nicer with a rollback DSL that can set a marker on the exchange and then the Spring TX interceptor can notice this and force a rollback. As the rollkback() should also work under non TX conditiions it should throw a runtime exception for non TX exchanges. Or we should just add a new RollbackExchangeException that will be thrown.