- Race conditions can lead to data corruption, crashes, and security vulnerabilities if not properly addressed.
- Using a simple increment operation to update a shared counter is vulnerable to race conditions and can result in incorrect counts.
- Locking the database row using "SELECT FOR UPDATE" is not sufficient to prevent race conditions, as it does not guarantee atomicity.
- Transactions are essential to ensure atomicity and prevent race conditions, but simply using a transaction is not enough - the specific SQL query used must also be atomic.
- Updating the counter using an atomic SQL query (e.g. "UPDATE table SET views = views + 1 WHERE id = $1") is a more scalable and efficient solution compared to locking rows.
- When dealing with game economies and player balances, it's crucial to enforce constraints at the database level (e.g. CHECK constraints) to prevent negative balances.
- Transactions do not inherently prevent all race conditions - the specific implementation and isolation level used is important.
- Avoid using "LOCK TABLE" as it can lead to performance issues and scalability problems.
- Testing for race conditions by simulating concurrent requests is essential to identify and address such issues.
- There is no single silver bullet solution - each approach has trade-offs that must be carefully considered based on the specific requirements of the application.