You can transaction-protect your cursor operations by specifying a transaction handle at the time that you create your cursor. Beyond that, you do not ever provide a transaction handle directly to a cursor method.

Note that if you transaction-protect a cursor, then you must make sure that the cursor is closed before you either commit or abort the transaction. For example:

package db.txn;

import com.sleepycat.db.Cursor;
import com.sleepycat.db.Database;
import com.sleepycat.db.DatabaseConfig;
import com.sleepycat.db.DatabaseEntry;
import com.sleepycat.db.DatabaseException;
import com.sleepycat.db.Environment;
import com.sleepycat.db.EnvironmentConfig;
import com.sleepycat.db.LockMode;
import com.sleepycat.db.OperationStatus;
import com.sleepycat.db.Transaction;

import java.io.File;

...

Database myDatabase = null;
Environment myEnv = null;
try {

    // Database and environment opens omitted

    String replacementData = "new data";

    Transaction txn = null;
    txn = myEnv.beginTransaction(null, null);
    Cursor cursor = null;
    try {
        // Use the transaction handle here
        cursor = db.openCursor(txn, null);
        DatabaseEntry key, data;
        
        DatabaseEntry key, data;
        while(cursor.getNext(key, data, LockMode.DEFAULT) ==
           OperationStatus.SUCCESS) {
            
            data.setData(replacementData.getBytes("UTF-8"));
            // No transaction handle is used on the cursor read or write
            // methods.
            cursor.putCurrent(data);
        }
        
        cursor.close();
        cursor = null;
        txn.commit();
        txn = null;
    } catch (Exception e) {
        if (cursor != null) {
            cursor.close();
        }
        if (txn != null) {
            txn.abort();
            txn = null;
        }
    }

} catch (DatabaseException de) {
    // Exception handling goes here
}