Lost Update

Kind: anti-pattern

Layer: Enforcement Core

Aliases: Whole-File Write Race

Record: architecture:lost-update

Severity: discouraged

Scope: state_transaction

Formed by: Allow concurrent writers to overwrite each other without version checks, locks, compare-and-swap, or transaction isolation.

Canonical: Ontology

A defect in which concurrent writers overwrite each other's changes without a version check.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Silent Data Corruption and before Dual Write.

Refactored by

• Optimistic Locking
• Pessimistic Locking
• Merge Policy
• Transaction Isolation Level

Severity

• discouraged

Category

• Anti-patterns

Force

• State transaction

Violates

• Vector Clocks
• CRDTs

Negated by

• Write Barrier
• Concurrency Control

Linked from

• Shared surfaces
• Coordination is software
• Seven controls, seven classes
• Anti-patterns
• Causality / Ordering / Distributed Time
• Coordination Surfaces
• Transactions / State / Concurrency
• Core Vocabulary
• Transactions / State / Concurrency
• Severity levels
• The forces