11.4. Optimistic Concurrency Control

The only approach that is consistent with high concurrency and high scalability, is optimistic concurrency control with versioning. Version checking uses version numbers, or timestamps, to detect conflicting updates and to prevent lost updates. Hibernate provides three possible approaches to writing application code that uses optimistic concurrency. The use cases we discuss are in the context of long conversations, but version checking also has the benefit of preventing lost updates in single database transactions.