One year of blogging

Teaching is my way of learning Exactly one year ago today, I wrote my very first blog post. It’s been such a long journey ever since, so it’s time to draw a line and review all my technical writing accomplishments. I realized that sharing knowledge is a way of pushing myself to reason thoroughly on a particular subject. So, both my readers and I have something to learn from my writing. Finding time to think of future blog topics, researching particular subjects, writing code snippets and the ever-present pre-publishing reviews is worth… Read More

The fastest way of drawing UML class diagrams

A picture is worth a thousand words Understanding a software design proposal is so much easier once you can actually visualize it. While writing diagrams might take you an extra effort, the small time investment will pay off when others will require less time to understand your proposal. Software is a means, not a goal We are writing software to support other people business requirements. Understanding business goals are the first step towards coming up with an effective design proposal. After gathering input from your product owner, you should write down the… Read More

How to prevent lost updates in long conversations

Introduction All database statements are executed within the context of a physical transaction, even when we don’t explicitly declare transaction boundaries (BEGIN/COMMIT/ROLLBACK). Data integrity is enforced by the ACID properties of database transactions. Logical vs Physical transactions A logical transaction is an application-level unit of work that may span over multiple physical (database) transactions. Holding the database connection open throughout several user requests, including user think time, is definitely an anti-pattern. A database server can accommodate a limited number of physical connections, and often those are reused by using connection pooling. Holding… Read More

A beginner’s guide to database locking and the lost update phenomena

Introduction A database is highly concurrent system. There’s always a chance of update conflicts, like when two concurring transactions try to update the same record. If there would be only one database transaction at any time then all operations would be executed sequentially. The challenge comes when multiple transactions try to update the same database rows as we still have to ensure consistent data state transitions. The SQL standard defines three consistency anomalies (phenomena): Dirty reads, prevented by Read Committed, Repeatable Read and Serializable isolation levels Non-repeatable read, prevented by Repeatable Read… Read More

How does the bytecode enhancement dirty checking mechanism work in Hibernate 4.3

Introduction Now that you know the basics of Hibernate dirty checking, we can dig into enhanced dirty checking mechanisms. While the default graph-traversal algorithm might be sufficient for most use-cases, there might be times when you need an optimized dirty checking algorithm and instrumentation is much more convenient than building your own custom strategy. Using Ant Hibernate Tools Traditionally, The Hibernate Tools have been focused on Ant and Eclipse. Bytecode instrumentation has been possible since Hibernate 3, but it required an Ant task to run the CGLIB or Javassist bytecode enhancement routines.

From mostly interested to most interesting

No money can buy this feeling Being appreciated for my work is what pushes me forward to contribute more. I am proud to be nominated as one of the most interesting developers. Ever since I started this blog, helping others on Stack Overflow or contributing to Open Source Software many good things have happened. Being mentioned on the same page with Christoph Engelbert is more than flattering. With all optimism, I’ve never thought I’d get this nomination. Thank you, Jelastic, you made my day!