Showing posts with label database. Show all posts
Showing posts with label database. Show all posts

Transactions and some concurrency problems

A group of us are reading Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Chapter 7 is on transactions and especially the different approaches used to address concurrency problems, ie the Isolation in ACID. What becomes clear is that transaction isolation levels can only mitigate some problems. It is your application's data model design and use that are mostly responsible for avoiding them. Here are the concurrency problems raised in this chapter:

Lost Updates. These occur when a process reads some records, modifies them, and writes them back. If the updated records had been modified by another process after the read then those updates would be lost.

Read Skew. This is a variation of Lost Updates due to the delays between steps in a multiple step operation. Processes A and B are interacting with the same records. Process A reads records X and Y (two steps). Process B updates records X and Y (two steps). Due to the delay between A's and B's steps, process A has the original X value but the updated Y value.

Write Skew. This occurs when process A reads some records to make a decision and then updates other records appropriate to the decision. While the decision is being made process B changes some records that would alter process A's decision. Process A is unaware of process B's changes and continues to make its updates which invalidates the data model.

Phantoms. This is a variation of Write Skew. Process A queries for records to make a decision. Process B inserts records that would have been included in process A's query results. Unaware of these inserts, process A makes its updates which invalidates the data model. The "phantoms" are the records not included in process A's query result.

SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming

SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming is a useful compendium of common relation database design flaws. There are a number of anti-patterns where a single table is used to implement a data model that actually has more than one entity. Or, a metadata data model is implemented using a single table or multiple tables where, respectively, the reverse is better. The content is split into 5 parts: logical design, physical design, query, development, and appendixes. The first 3 are the most relevant to the book's title. The development chapter does have useful information on good application development practices, but could have been left out. Overall, worth reading and keeping on your shelf to share with others (and a reminder to yourself!) as the need arrises.