Design for concurrency

May include but is not limited to: hints, transaction isolation level, effect of database option READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT, rowversion and timestamp datatypes

Most of this objective is covered in the previous post there’s simply too much overlapping in this part of the exam, as far as I can grab it. Anyway, there are some other interesting issues with locking and concurrency, so here’s a brief post on the remainders.

There are two data types related to concurrency – rowversion and timestamp. Rowversion is a binary data type which stores eight bytes, and increments automatically on every insert and update. Note that each table can have only one rowversion column, and you must give a name for it (you don’t have to specify a name for a timestamp value). Rowversion type is useful when you expecting multiple updates in roughly the same time, but I’ve stumbled into it when used LINQ to SQL along with WCF, too.