Concurrency control prevents overlapping updates from entity instances running in different threads or different servers, or from applications running outside of EAServer. There are two approaches for concurrency control:
In the Pessimistic concurrency control (PCC) model, data rows are locked when read, for the duration of the EAServer transaction. This method can introduce database deadlocks and usually reduces the scalability of the application.
In the Optimistic concurrency control (OCC) model, data rows are not locked when read. Timestamps are used for concurrency control; the timestamp can be a timestamp column in the database that is updated every time the row is modified, or it can be the row data itself. At the end of the transaction, the in-memory timestamp value is compared to the timestamp value in the database, and the transaction rolls back if the values do not match.
OCC allows greater scalability than PCC for most CMP entity beans. However, when using OCC, you must code your application to retry rejected updates, or you must enable automatic transaction retry for the application components as described below.
PCC can perform better than OCC when your beans are mapped to tables with very high update contention. In these cases, the overhead of retrying transactions that fail due to update collisions can outweigh that caused by using database locks. If you have configured OCC as described below, and see many “TRANSACTION_ROLLEDBACK: Optimistic Concurrency Control” messages in the server log, you should try PCC on the component identified in these messages.
