Comment by jrochkind1
1 day ago
Hm, I misunderstood, I thought the checkpoint system was also concurrency control to make sure nobody else had changed it from underneath you between read and write, since you had to read and write the whole (mega) document even though you only wanted to change a part (sub-document).
Doesn't the KV provide idempotency on it's own -- so long as you're checking that no changes have happened between read and write, why wouldn't doing the same write twice produce an idempotent result? A change happenening between read and write seems the only reason that would be a problem.
But clearly it's complicated and we don't have the whole picture as to business needs. Definitely sounds awful.
> why wouldn't doing the same write twice produce an idempotent result
you can imagine this:
```
var thing = KVStore.Get<MyThing>(...);
if (things.Checkpoints.Contains(myUuid) == false) {
}
KVStore.Update(thing); ```
having an etag doesn't help you with retries, where we expect that `thing` could be mutated by another flow between your retries.
If the thing was mutated between your retries, then wasn't the etag changed by that mutation? So if you know the etag you started with, your conditional update on etag fails due to changed etag. So you fetch it again and start over. Which is the general optimistic locking algorithm.
i may be missing something though?