Optimistic Concurrency

I’ve been looking at synchronization-related concepts lately. It’s been really nice to revisit some ideas/concepts from my PhD years (e.g. consistency models for shared data in distributed environments). ‘Optimistic concurrency’ is a term I’ve encountered a lot and I just read the “Optimistic concurrency – a false panacea” post by Yaro Goland (via Mark Baker). Interesting!

I am not going to try to disagree with the arguments since I am just learning this area and I don’t have the much needed real world experience 🙂 However, I would like to point out that I’ve encountered systems where optimistic concurrency works relatively well (always apply the right tool for the right job!). A couple of examples come in mind: Active Directory and Windows Server Distributed File System. Granted, these are not transactions systems but they do optimistically propagate updates given their multi-owner nature for shared data. Perhaps I am not comparing similar things.

A good paper to read is “Optimistic Replication” by Saito and Shapiro.

Recent Posts

BrainExpanded – Web app and Data Sources

As I wrote in previous posts, the manual recording of memories for BrainExpanded is just…

2 days ago

BrainExpanded – End-to-end working

Imagine a world where your memory is enhanced by a team of intelligent agents, working…

2 weeks ago

BrainExpanded – Login State Caching Issue in iOS Share Extension

As part of the BrainExpanded project, I’m building an iOS app that lets users easily…

2 months ago

Is AI Good or Bad?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly evolved over the past few decades, becoming an integral part…

2 months ago

BrainExpanded – Copilot

Happy New Year everyone! I was planning for my next BrainExpanded post to be a…

4 months ago

BrainExpanded – The Timeline

See "BrainExpanded - Introduction" for context on this post. Notes and links Over the years,…

4 months ago