[traceroute66]

Optimistic locking in a stateless environment is actually not difficult to implement. The hardest part is actually making sure #devops are aware of the concept !

Tom Kyte, he of Oracle fame had a particularly good discussion of the concept in one of his books (Effective Oracle by Design ... IIRC).

IIRC, the Oracle way is to enable rowdependencies for the table(s) in question and then use ora_rowscn.

But in reality, you can use almost anything that changes in a defined fashion (timestamps, version numbers etc.). Then all you need to do is test for it in your database stored procedures (or elsewhere in your middleware if you are not using sprocs).