Concurrency control

Concurrency control is the management of contention for data resources. A concurrency control scheme is considered pessimistic when it locks a given resource early in the data access transaction and does not release it until the transaction is closed. A concurrency control scheme is considered optimistic when locks are acquired and released over a short period of time at the end of a transaction.

The objective of optimistic concurrency is to minimize the time that a given resource is unavailable for use by other transactions. This is especially important with long-running transactions, which under a pessimistic scheme would lock up a resource for unacceptably long periods of time.

Under an optimistic scheme, locks are obtained immediately before a read operation and released immediately after. Update locks are obtained immediately before an update operation and held until the end of the transaction.

To enable optimistic concurrency, this product uses an overqualified update scheme to test if the underlying data source has been updated by another transaction since the beginning of the current transaction. With this scheme, the columns marked for update and their original values are added explicitly through a WHERE clause in the UPDATE statement so that the statement fails if the underlying column values have been changed. As a result, this scheme can provide column-level concurrency control; pessimistic schemes can control concurrency at the row level only.

Optimistic schemes typically perform this type of test only at the end of a transaction. If the underlying columns have not been updated since the beginning of the transaction, pending updates to container-managed persistence fields are committed and the locks are released. If locks cannot be acquired or if some other transaction has updated the columns since the beginning of the current transaction, the transaction is rolled back: All work performed within the transaction is lost.

Pessimistic and optimistic concurrency schemes require different transaction isolation levels. Enterprise beans that participate in the same transaction and require different concurrency control schemes cannot operate on the same underlying data connection.

Whether to use optimistic concurrency depends on the type of transaction. Transactions with a high penalty for failure might be better managed with a pessimistic scheme. A high-penalty transaction is one for which recovery is risky or resource-intensive. For low-penalty transactions, it is often worth the risk of failure to gain efficiency through the use of an optimistic scheme. In general, optimistic concurrency is more efficient when update collisions are expected to be infrequent; pessimistic concurrency is more efficient when update collisions are expected to occur often.best-practices

Related:

Database deadlocks caused by lock upgrades

Use access intent policies for EJB 2.x entity beans

Access intent -- isolation levels and update locks