Micro Services and Transaction Manager how to handle concurrency Issue

Question

I am working on building a microservice which is using transaction manager implemented based on Java Transaction API(JTA).

My question is does Trasaction maanger have ability to handle concurrency issue in distributed database scenario's .

Scenario:

Assume there are multiple instance of a service running and we get two requests to update balance amount by 10 in an account. Initially an account can have $100 and the first instance gets that and increments it to $10 but has not been commited yet.

At the same time the second instance also retreive's account which is still 100 and increments it by $10 and then commits it updating balance to $110 and then service one updates account again to $110.

By this time you must have figured that balance was supposed to be incremented by $20 and not 10. Do I have to write some kind of Optimistic lock exception mechanism to prevent the above scenario or will Transaction Manager based on JTA specification already ensure such a thing will not happen ?

Answer 1

The transaction manager (as implementation of the JTA specification) makes transparent a work above multiple resources. It ensures all the operations happens as a single unit of work. The "work above multiple resources" mean that that the application can insert data to database and meanwhile it sends a message to a JMS broker. Transaction manager guarantees ACID properties to be hold for this two operations. In simplistic form when the transaction finishes successfully the application developer can be sure both operation was processed. When some trouble happens is on the transaction manager to handle it - possibly throw an exception and rollback the data changes. Thus neither operation was processed. It makes this transparent for the application developer who does not need to care to update first database and then JMS and checks if all data changes were really processed or a failure happens.

In general the JTA specification was not written with microservice architecture in mind. Now it really depends on your system design(!) But if I consider you have two microservices where each one has attached its own transaction manager then the transaction manager can't help you to sort out your concurrency issue. Transaction managers does not work (usually) in some synchronization. You don't work with multiple resources from one microservice (what is the usecase for the transaction manager) but with one resource from multiple microservices.

As there is the one resource it's the synchronization point for all you updates. It depends on it how it manages concurrency. Considering it's a SQL database then it depends on the level of the isolation it uses (ACID - I = isolation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID_(computer_science)). Your particular example talks about lost update phenomena (https://vladmihalcea.com/a-beginners-guide-to-database-locking-and-the-lost-update-phenomena/). As both microservices tries to update one record. One solution for the avoiding the issue is using optimistic/pesimistic locking (you can implement it on your own by e.g. timestamps as stated above), the other is to use serializable isolation level in your database, or you can design your application for not reading and updating data based on what is read first time but change the sql query having the update atomic (or there are possibly other strategies how to work with your data model to achieve the desired outcome).

In summary - it depends on how your transaction manager is implemented, it can help you in a way but it's not its purpose. Your goal should be to check how the isolation level is set up at the shared storage and consider if your application needs to handle lost update phenomena at application level or your storage cang manage it for you.

Answer 2

For such type of requests, you can handle through Optimistic Concurrency where you would have a column on the database (Timestamp) as a reference to the version number.

Each time when a change is commited it would modify the timestamp value.

If two requests try to commit the change at the same time, only one of them will succeed as the version (Timestamp) column will change by then negating other request from comitting its changes.

Answer 3

does Trasaction maanger have ability to handle concurrency issue in distributed database scenario's .

Transactions and concurrency are two independent concepts and though Transactions become most siginificant in context where we also see concurrency , transactions can be important without concurrency.

To answer your question : No , Transaction Manager generally does not concern itself with handling issues that arise with concurrent updates. It takes a very naive and simple ( and often most meaningful ) approach : if after the start of a transaction , it detects that the state has become inconsistent ( because of concurrent updates ) it would simply raise it as an exception and Rollback the transaction. If only it can establish that all the conditions of the ACID properties of the transaction are still valid will it commit the transaction.