Concurrency control – managing multiple users
Another technique that’s employed in databases for managing concurrency is MVCC, which is designed to enhance performance by minimizing lock contention, thereby avoiding blocking user requests. Unlike traditional locking mechanisms, which can be categorized as either pessimistic or optimistic, MVCC works by maintaining multiple versions of data, or snapshots. When a transaction reads data, it sees a snapshot of the data as it was at a specific point in time, rather than the current form, potentially an in-flux version. This approach allows for concurrent reads and writes without to need to lock data resources for each operation. MVCC does not necessarily use data mutation instead of locking; rather, it reduces the need for and reliance on extensive locking by providing each transaction with an isolated snapshot of the database.
One of the main advantages of MVCC is that it allows read operations to proceed without being...
