Java Google Appengine sharded counters without transactions

Question

I'm going through the Sharded Counters example in Java: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_counters.html

I have a question about the implementation of the increment method. In python it explicitly wraps the get() and increment in a transaction. In the Java example it just retrieves it and sets it. I'm not sure I fully understand the Datastore and transactions but it seems like the critical update section should be wrapped in a datastore transaction. Am I missing something?

Original code:

  public void increment() {
    PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager();

    Random generator = new Random();
    int shardNum = generator.nextInt(NUM_SHARDS);

    try {
      Query shardQuery = pm.newQuery(SimpleCounterShard.class);
      shardQuery.setFilter("shardNumber == numParam");
      shardQuery.declareParameters("int numParam");

      List<SimpleCounterShard> shards =
          (List<SimpleCounterShard>) shardQuery.execute(shardNum);
      SimpleCounterShard shard;

      // If the shard with the passed shard number exists, increment its count
      // by 1. Otherwise, create a new shard object, set its count to 1, and
      // persist it.
      if (shards != null && !shards.isEmpty()) {
        shard = shards.get(0);
        shard.setCount(shard.getCount() + 1);
      } else {
        shard = new SimpleCounterShard();
        shard.setShardNumber(shardNum);
        shard.setCount(1);
      }

      pm.makePersistent(shard);
    } finally {
      pm.close();
    }
  }
}

Transactional code (I believe you need to run this in a transaction to gurantee correctness under concurrent transactions?) :

public void increment() { 
    PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager(); 
    Random generator = new Random(); 
    int shardNum = generator.nextInt(NUM_SHARDS); 
    try { 
      Query shardQuery = pm.newQuery(SimpleCounterShard.class); 
      shardQuery.setFilter("shardNumber == numParam"); 
      shardQuery.declareParameters("int numParam"); 
      List<SimpleCounterShard> shards = 
          (List<SimpleCounterShard>) shardQuery.execute(shardNum); 
      SimpleCounterShard shard; 
      // If the shard with the passed shard number exists, increment its count 
      // by 1. Otherwise, create a new shard object, set its count to 1, and 
      // persist it. 
      if (shards != null && !shards.isEmpty()) { 
            Transaction tx = pm.currentTransaction(); 
        try { 
            tx.begin(); 
            //I believe in a transaction objects need to be loaded by ID (can't use the outside queried entity) 
             Key shardKey = KeyFactory.Builder(SimpleCounterShard.class.getSimpleName(), shards.get(0).getID()) 
            shard =  pm.getObjectById(SimpleCounterShard.class, shardKey); 
            shard.setCount(shard.getCount() + 1); 
            tx.commit(); 
        } finally { 
            if (tx.isActive()) { 
                tx.rollback(); 
            } 
        } 
      } else { 
        shard = new SimpleCounterShard(); 
        shard.setShardNumber(shardNum); 
        shard.setCount(1); 
      } 
      pm.makePersistent(shard); 
    } finally { 
      pm.close(); 
    } 
  }