Lost Updates: Optimistic vs Pessimistic Locking
Two admins edit the same product; one change silently vanishes. Lesson 9 of Level 8: Data-Intensive Systems. Based on DDIA.
Level 8 · Data-Intensive Systems · Lesson 9 of 15
Two admins edit the same product; one change silently vanishes.
Continue learning
- Isolation Levels: Dirty Reads to Serializable — Previous lesson
- The Trouble With Distributed Systems — Next lesson
- Level 8: Data-Intensive Systems — Back to the level
Try it hands-on
- Lost Updates & Optimistic Locking — Two admins edit the same product price; compare no locking, optimistic versions and pessimistic locks.
- Transactions Lab — Isolation anomalies, lost updates and distributed transactions.
All lessons in Data Systems
- Storage Engines: B-Trees vs LSM-Trees
- Indexes: Fast Reads, Slower Writes
- Caching: Speed at the Cost of Truth
- Replication: Leaders, Followers & Failover
- Replication Lag: When Your Own Write Disappears
- Partitioning: Hash, Range, Hotspots & Rebalancing
- Transactions & What ACID Actually Promises
- Isolation Levels: Dirty Reads to Serializable
- Lost Updates: Optimistic vs Pessimistic Locking
- The Trouble With Distributed Systems
- Consistency Models, CAP & Consensus
- Logs & Kafka: Partitions, Offsets and Ordering
- Consumer Groups & Delivery Semantics
- Batch vs Stream Processing & Data Pipelines
- Event Sourcing & CQRS