Dynamic

Pessimistic Locking vs Event Sourcing

Developers should use pessimistic locking when building applications with high contention for shared resources, such as financial systems, inventory management, or booking platforms, where concurrent updates could lead to data corruption or race conditions meets developers should use event sourcing when building systems that require strong auditability, temporal querying, or complex business logic with undo/redo capabilities, such as financial applications, e-commerce platforms, or collaborative tools. Here's our take.

🧊Nice Pick

Pessimistic Locking

Developers should use pessimistic locking when building applications with high contention for shared resources, such as financial systems, inventory management, or booking platforms, where concurrent updates could lead to data corruption or race conditions

Pessimistic Locking

Nice Pick

Developers should use pessimistic locking when building applications with high contention for shared resources, such as financial systems, inventory management, or booking platforms, where concurrent updates could lead to data corruption or race conditions

Pros

  • +It is particularly useful in environments where transactions are long-running or when strict ACID compliance is necessary to prevent lost updates or dirty reads
  • +Related to: database-transactions, concurrency-control

Cons

  • -Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Event Sourcing

Developers should use Event Sourcing when building systems that require strong auditability, temporal querying, or complex business logic with undo/redo capabilities, such as financial applications, e-commerce platforms, or collaborative tools

Pros

  • +It is particularly valuable in microservices architectures for maintaining consistency across services and enabling event-driven communication, as it decouples state storage from business logic and supports scalability through event replay
  • +Related to: domain-driven-design, cqrs

Cons

  • -Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

Use Pessimistic Locking if: You want it is particularly useful in environments where transactions are long-running or when strict acid compliance is necessary to prevent lost updates or dirty reads and can live with specific tradeoffs depend on your use case.

Use Event Sourcing if: You prioritize it is particularly valuable in microservices architectures for maintaining consistency across services and enabling event-driven communication, as it decouples state storage from business logic and supports scalability through event replay over what Pessimistic Locking offers.

🧊
The Bottom Line
Pessimistic Locking wins

Developers should use pessimistic locking when building applications with high contention for shared resources, such as financial systems, inventory management, or booking platforms, where concurrent updates could lead to data corruption or race conditions

Disagree with our pick? nice@nicepick.dev