Checkpoint: Databases & Data Access
advanced25 min readLesson 154 of 169
Prove you can fight for consistency under contention and keep the pool honest.
The exam question: two workers update the same inventory row at the same
time. Both read stock = 1. Both decrement. How many widgets does the customer
buy? One — if you built the write correctly.
The checkpoint challenge combines optimistic concurrency and the unit-of-work
rule: apply a batch of decrements against a simulated table, where concurrent
writers (the conflict_on_attempt simulation from the practice) race you, and
each unit of work must either fully land or cleanly retry.