During my early years of development I only knew of one way locking was done by source control systems (SCM), and that was pessimistic locking. Before modifying a source file you have to ‘lock’ it, so that nobody else can modify it at the same time (hence the pessimism). I had heard about optimistic locking, but purely from an academic standpoint and that approach did not seem practical to me. One day I had to use an optimistic based source control system: Subversion (SVN). Although at first the change of paradigm was not smooth, nowadays I have been converted into an optimist. This blog is about my experiences transitioning from pessimist to optimist and why I now prefer optimistic locking.

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