Optimistic Locking
Optimistic locking is a concurrency control strategy used in database and distributed systems to prevent data conflicts when multiple users or processes attempt to update the same record simultaneously. It assumes that conflicts are rare and allows transactions to proceed without locking resources, checking for conflicts only at commit time using version numbers or timestamps. This approach improves performance and scalability compared to pessimistic locking by reducing lock contention.
Developers should use optimistic locking in high-concurrency environments where read operations far outnumber writes, such as web applications with many users accessing shared data. It is ideal for scenarios where data conflicts are infrequent, like e-commerce product listings or collaborative editing tools, as it avoids the performance overhead of locking resources. This strategy is also valuable in distributed systems or microservices architectures where maintaining locks across nodes is complex and inefficient.