One data store. Multiple processes. Will this SQL prevent race conditions?

I'm trying to create a Ruby script that spawns several concurrent child processes, each of which needs to access the same data store (a queue of some type) and do something with the data. The problem is that each row of data should be 开发者_开发问答processed only once, and a child process has no way of knowing whether another child process might be operating on the same data at the same instant.

I haven't picked a data store yet, but I'm leaning toward PostgreSQL simply because it's what I'm used to. I've seen the following SQL fragment suggested as a way to avoid race conditions, because the UPDATE clause supposedly locks the table row before the SELECT takes place:

UPDATE jobs
SET status = 'processed'
WHERE id = (
    SELECT id FROM jobs WHERE status = 'pending' LIMIT 1
) RETURNING id, data_to_process;

But will this really work? It doesn't seem intuitive the Postgres (or any other database) could lock the table row before performing the SELECT, since the SELECT has to be executed to determine which table row needs to be locked for updating. In other words, I'm concerned that this SQL fragment won't really prevent two separate processes from select and operating on the same table row.

Am I being paranoid? And are there better options than traditional RDBMSs to handle concurrency situations like this?

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As you said, use a queue. The standard solution for this in PostgreSQL is PgQ. It has all these concurrency problems worked out for you.

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Do you really want many concurrent child processes that must operate serially on a single data store? I suggest that you create one writer process who has sole access to the database (whatever you use) and accepts requests from the other processes to do the database operations you want. Then do the appropriate queue management in that thread rather than making your database do it, and you are assured that only one process accesses the database at any time.

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The situation you are describing is called "Non-repeatable read". There are two ways to solve this.

The preferred way would be to set the transaction isolation level to at least REPEATABLE READ. This will mean that any row that concurrent updates of the nature you described will fail. if two processes update the same rows in overlapping transactions one of them will be canceled, its changes ignored, and will return an error. That transaction will have to be retried. This is achieved by calling

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL REPEATABLE READ

At the start of the transaction. I can't seem to find documentation that explains an idiomatic way of doing this for ruby; you may have to emit that sql explicitly.

The other option is to manage the locking of tables explicitly, which can cause a transaction to block (and possibly deadlock) until the table is free. Transactions won't fail in the same way as they do above, but contention will be much higher, and so I won't describe the details.

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That's pretty close to the approach I took when I wrote pg_message_queue, which is a simple queue implementation for PostgreSQL. Unlike PgQ, it requires no components outside of PostgreSQL to use.

It will work just fine. MVCC will come to the rescue.