Blog Post

by Tim Lucas

Person.transaction do 
  person = Person.find(1, :lock => true) 
  person.visits += 1 
  person.save! 
end 

This post has 8 responses so far

1. Wow ground breaking.

   Tex
   June 21st, 2006 at 9:24 am

2. I know I sorely missed this feature. Not sure about others… but thanks for the input Tex ;)

   timlucas
   June 21st, 2006 at 11:02 am

3. Tim,

   I am having trouble figuring out what this does. Can you explain for those of us new to this, and give us an example of what we could use it for?

   SRTech
   June 22nd, 2006 at 2:08 am

4. Sorry SRTech, a full explanation would have been much more helpful.

   Read locks such as this ensure that no other queries can read that table row until the transaction has completed. Because you want to be able to execute your code simultaneously, and from different servers, database locks can be used to make sure your is consistent.

   For example, say you want to implement something that tracks the visits for your user accounts.

   A simple implementation could be:

   
   user = User.find(session[:user_id])
   user.update_attribute(:visits, user.visits+1)
   

   If the user makes simultaneous requests you can get what’s called a race condition.

   For example, the following could be the order of execution if the the same user made 2 simultaneous requests:

   
   user_request_1 = User.find(session[:user_id])
   user_request_2 = User.find(session[:user_id])
   user_request_1.update_attribute(:visits, user_request_1.visits+1)
   user_request_2.update_attribute(:visits, user_request_2.visits+1)
   

   The problem here is that visits should really be 3, not 2.

   With web applications you need multiple application servers to be able to execute the code concurrently. The database is the perfect fit to handle this case.

   Changing the code to:

   
   User.transaction do
     user = User.find(session[:user_id], :lock => true)
     user.update_attribute(:visits, user.visits+1)
   end
   

   produces the following SQL code:

   
   START TRANSACTION;
   SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1 FOR UPDATE;
   UPDATE users SET visits = 2, (...) WHERE id = 1;
   COMMIT;
   

   Does that make more sense?

   (updated to remove inaccurate SQL comments)

   timlucas
   June 23rd, 2006 at 9:17 am

5. Tim, there is a major error in your code above. Calling update_attribute will NOT update a single attribute – it will update the single attribute in memory then save the ENTIRE record.

   Luke Redpath
   June 28th, 2006 at 7:31 pm

6. Thanks Luke, you’re totally right!

   Not that it really matters in the above example, because we are locking the entire row, but I’ll update the article for correctness.

   timlucas
   June 29th, 2006 at 12:14 pm

7. hey Tim dats a gud article for quick reference. thnx :)

   ritukamthan
   July 25th, 2006 at 7:57 pm

8. Thanks for the writeup!

   I’ve written up some notes on testing rails code with concurrency issues over here

   ian white
   December 11th, 2006 at 9:58 pm