- PROPAGATION_REQUIRES_NEW starts a new, independent "inner" transaction for the given scope. This transaction will be committed or rolled back completely independent from the outer transaction, having its own isolation scope, its own set of locks, etc. The outer transaction will get suspended at the beginning of the inner one, and resumed once the inner one has completed.
Such independent inner transactions are for example used for id generation through manual sequences, where the access to the sequence table should happen in its own transactions, to keep the lock there as short as possible. The goal there is to avoid tying the sequence locks to the (potentially much longer running) outer transaction, with the sequence lock not getting released before completion of the outer transaction.
- PROPAGATION_NESTED on the other hand starts a "nested" transaction, which is a true subtransaction of the existing one. What will happen is that a savepoint will be taken at the start of the nested transaction. I