[masklinn]

> Then it's bad unnormalized data design that is the problem here.

That the table is not normalised makes the example somewhat confusing but it does not actually affect the issue being demonstrated. And denormalisation is a fact of data modelling.

[npstr]

Why not simply use an example that isn't confusing? Many developers, and especially academics, love wasting effort and time on solving issues they made up but that have no real life examples. When using examples that have trivial alternative solutions, it does not help me as a reader to distinguish whether this is a real problem, or something made up.

[avianlyric]

Because every example you can think of is confusing, because understanding how concurrent transactions should operate is confusing.

Almost all problems like this can be solved by improving an application data model, but here’s the thing, lots applications have dodgy data models, either due to time constraints, or because the application evolved over time, and the data model didn’t. So these are all real world problems and examples, but creating a “simple” problem to demonstrate the issue almost certainly means also creating an example where other “obvious” solutions exist.

Just because you can’t imagine how this simple example might represent a much more complex “real world” problem, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.