Optimistic Locking
With many applications, clients need to fetch the data to browse through it, make modifications to one or more rows, and then post the changes back to the database in SQL Server. These human-speed operations are slow in comparison to machine-speed operations, and the time lag between the fetch and post might be significant. (Consider the user who goes to lunch after retrieving the data.)
For these applications, you would not want to use normal locking schemes such as SERIALIZABLE or HOLDLOCK to lock the data so it can't be changed from the time the user retrieves it to the time he applies any updates. This would violate one of the cardinal rules of not allowing user interaction within transactions. You also would lose all control ...
Get Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
