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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Optimistic locking

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, optimistic locking means: Checking whether data changed after it was read before accepting an update, often using a version value.

In Turkish: iyimser kilitleme

How it is used

Used when conflicts are relatively uncommon. A conflict usually requires retrying, merging or asking the user to resolve it.

Example sentences

  1. The optimistic locking check rejected my edit because another user had already changed the record.

    The version check detects that the edit was based on an older state.

  2. We added optimistic locking to prevent two workers from silently overwriting each other's updates.

    Detecting a conflict makes it explicit instead of accepting the stale write.

Common collocations

  • optimistic locking version
  • optimistic locking conflict
  • lockA mark the database places on a row, page or table so that other transactions cannot change it, or sometimes read it, until the current transaction ends.
  • transactionA group of database operations that are treated as one unit: either all of them succeed together or none of them is applied.

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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