Plot: User Alice updates the row to remove the extra space. In the meantime, user Bob updates it to change the title to its phonetic Japanese equivalent “Shichinin no Samurai” and user Carol updates the release date to 1954, the year the movie was first shown in Japan. Whose updates will survive?
If the updates take place sequentially and each user fetches the previously updated row prior to saving his or her change, we should end up with a row with “Shichinin no Samurai” as the title and 1954 as the year.
However, if each user starts viewing the original row in a web browser and the application is incorrectly designed, one or two changes may be overwritten.
For example, my minimalist user interface application even in its more robust incarnation, issues an UPDATE with both the title and the year as received from the user. This was done intentionally, for simplicity, to be corrected later. As a result, if the users press the “Save” button in the sequence shown, both Alice’s correction to the English title and Bob’s change to a Japanese title will be lost because they will be overwritten by Carol’s change.
If you’ve used a centralized VCS, like Subversion, you’re probably familiar with the issue. If our users were developers updating a source file with the movie information, they would (typically) be prevented from overwriting because the VCS would inform the second and third users that they had to merge the changes in prior commits.
So, is it enough if the application only updates the columns that were changed by the users, somewhat like a VCS automatically merging non-conflicting changed lines?
To be continued …