Transactions and Concurrency

Starting v3.4, transactions are also supported in MongoDB driver.

Transaction Demarcation

Transaction demarcation is the task of defining your transaction boundaries. Proper transaction demarcation is very important because if not done properly it can negatively affect the performance of your application. Many databases and database abstraction layers by default operate in auto-commit mode, which means that every single SQL statement is wrapped in a small transaction. Without any explicit transaction demarcation from your side, this quickly results in poor performance because transactions are not cheap.

For the most part, MikroORM already takes care of proper transaction demarcation for you: All the write operations (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) are queued until em.flush() is invoked which wraps all of these changes in a single transaction.

However, MikroORM also allows (and encourages) you to take over and control transaction demarcation yourself.

These are two ways to deal with transactions when using the MikroORM and are now described in more detail.

Approach 1: Implicitly

The first approach is to use the implicit transaction handling provided by the MikroORM EntityManager. Given the following code snippet, without any explicit transaction demarcation:

const user = new User(...);
user.name = 'George';
await orm.em.persistAndFlush(user);

Since we do not do any custom transaction demarcation in the above code, em.flush() will begin and commit/rollback a transaction. This behavior is made possible by the aggregation of the DML operations by the MikroORM and is sufficient if all the data manipulation that is part of a unit of work happens through the domain model and thus the ORM.

Approach 2: Explicitly

The explicit alternative is to use the transactions API directly to control the boundaries. The code then looks like this:

await orm.em.transactional(em => {
  //... do some work
  const user = new User(...);
  user.name = 'George';
  em.persist(user);
});

Or you can use begin/commit/rollback methods explicitly. Following example is equivalent to the previous one:

const em = orm.em.fork(false);
await em.begin();

try {
  //... do some work
  const user = new User(...);
  user.name = 'George';
  em.persist(user);
  await em.commit(); // will flush before making the actual commit query
} catch (e) {
  await em.rollback();
  throw e;
}

Explicit transaction demarcation is required when you want to include custom DBAL operations in a unit of work or when you want to make use of some methods of the EntityManager API that require an active transaction. Such methods will throw a ValidationError to inform you of that requirement.

em.transactional(cb) will flush the inner EntityManager prior to transaction commit.

Exception Handling

When using implicit transaction demarcation and an exception occurs during em.flush(), the transaction is automatically rolled back.

When using explicit transaction demarcation and an exception occurs, the transaction should be rolled back immediately as demonstrated in the example above. This can be handled elegantly by the control abstractions shown earlier. Note that when catching Exception you should generally re-throw the exception. If you intend to recover from some exceptions, catch them explicitly in earlier catch blocks (but do not forget to rollback the transaction). All other best practices of exception handling apply similarly (i.e. either log or re-throw, not both, etc.).

As a result of this procedure, all previously managed or removed instances of the EntityManager become detached. The state of the detached objects will be the state at the point at which the transaction was rolled back. The state of the objects is in no way rolled back and thus the objects are now out of sync with the database. The application can continue to use the detached objects, knowing that their state is potentially no longer accurate.

If you intend to start another unit of work after an exception has occurred you should do that with a new EntityManager. Simply use em.fork() to obtain fresh copy with cleared identity map.

Locking Support

Why we need concurrency control?

If transactions are executed serially (one at a time), no transaction concurrency exists. However, if concurrent transactions with interleaving operations are allowed, you may easily run into one of those problems:

1. The lost update problem
2. The dirty read problem
3. The incorrect summary problem

To mitigate those problems, MikroORM offers support for Pessimistic and Optimistic locking strategies natively. This allows you to take very fine-grained control over what kind of locking is required for your entities in your application.

Optimistic Locking

Database transactions are fine for concurrency control during a single request. However, a database transaction should not span across requests, the so-called "user think time". Therefore a long-running "business transaction" that spans multiple requests needs to involve several database transactions. Thus, database transactions alone can no longer control concurrency during such a long-running business transaction. Concurrency control becomes the partial responsibility of the application itself.

MikroORM has integrated support for automatic optimistic locking via a version field. In this approach any entity that should be protected against concurrent modifications during long-running business transactions gets a version field that is either a simple number (mapping type: integer) or a timestamp (mapping type: datetime). When changes to such an entity are persisted at the end of a long-running conversation the version of the entity is compared to the version in the database and if they don't match, a ValidationError is thrown, indicating that the entity has been modified by someone else already.

You designate a version field in an entity as follows. In this example we'll use an integer.

export class User {
  // ...
  @Property({ version: true })
  version!: number;
  // ...
}

Alternatively a datetime type can be used (which maps to a SQL timestamp or datetime):

export class User {
  // ...
  @Property({ version: true })
  version!: Date;
  // ...
}

Version numbers (not timestamps) should however be preferred as they can not potentially conflict in a highly concurrent environment, unlike timestamps where this is a possibility, depending on the resolution of the timestamp on the particular database platform.

When a version conflict is encountered during em.flush(), a ValidationError is thrown and the active transaction rolled back (or marked for rollback). This exception can be caught and handled. Potential responses to a ValidationError are to present the conflict to the user or to refresh or reload objects in a new transaction and then retrying the transaction.

The time between showing an update form and actually modifying the entity can in the worst scenario be as long as your applications session timeout. If changes happen to the entity in that time frame you want to know directly when retrieving the entity that you will hit an optimistic locking exception:

You can always verify the version of an entity during a request either when calling em.findOne():

const theEntityId = 1;
const expectedVersion = 184;

try {
  const entity = await orm.em.findOne(User, theEntityId, { lockMode: LockMode.OPTIMISTIC, lockVersion: expectedVersion });

  // do the work

  await orm.em.flush();
} catch (e) {
  console.log('Sorry, but someone else has already changed this entity. Please apply the changes again!');
}

Or you can use em.lock() to find out:

const theEntityId = 1;
const expectedVersion = 184;
const entity = await orm.em.findOne(User, theEntityId);

try {
    // assert version
    await orm.em.lock(entity, LockMode.OPTIMISTIC, expectedVersion);
} catch (e) {
    console.log('Sorry, but someone else has already changed this entity. Please apply the changes again!');
}

Important Implementation Notes

You can easily get the optimistic locking workflow wrong if you compare the wrong versions. Say you have Alice and Bob editing a hypothetical blog post:

• Alice reads the headline of the blog post being "Foo", at optimistic lock version 1 (GET Request)
• Bob reads the headline of the blog post being "Foo", at optimistic lock version 1 (GET Request)
• Bob updates the headline to "Bar", upgrading the optimistic lock version to 2 (POST Request of a Form)
• Alice updates the headline to "Baz", ... (POST Request of a Form)

Now at the last stage of this scenario the blog post has to be read again from the database before Alice's headline can be applied. At this point you will want to check if the blog post is still at version 1 (which it is not in this scenario).

Using optimistic locking correctly, you have to add the version as an additional hidden field (or into the session for more safety). Otherwise you cannot verify the version is still the one being originally read from the database when Alice performed her GET request for the blog post. If this happens you might see lost updates you wanted to prevent with Optimistic Locking.

See the example code (frontend):

const res = await fetch('api.example.com/book/123');
const book = res.json();
console.log(book.version); // prints the current version

// user does some changes and calls the PUT handler
const changes = { title: 'new title' };
await fetch('api.example.com/book/123', {
  method: 'PUT',
  body: {
    ...changes,
    version: book.version,
  },
});

And the corresponding API endpoints:

// GET /book/:id
async findOne(req, res) {
  const book = await this.em.findOne(Book, +req.query.id);
  res.json(book);
}

// PUT /book/:id
async update(req, res) {
  const book = await this.em.findOne(Book, +req.query.id, { lockMode: LockMode.OPTIMISTIC, lockVersion: req.body.version });
  wrap(book).assign(req.body);
  await this.em.flush();

  res.json(book);
}

Your frontend app loads an entity from API, the response includes the version property. User makes some changes and fires PUT request back to the API, with version field included in the payload. The PUT handler of the API then reads the version and passes it to the em.findOne() call.

Pessimistic Locking

MikroORM supports Pessimistic Locking at the database level. No attempt is being made to implement pessimistic locking inside MikroORM, rather vendor-specific and ANSI-SQL commands are used to acquire row-level locks. Every Entity can be part of a pessimistic lock, there is no special metadata required to use this feature.

However for Pessimistic Locking to work you have to disable the Auto-Commit Mode of your Database and start a transaction around your pessimistic lock use-case using the "Approach 2: Explicit Transaction Demarcation" described above. MikroORM will throw an Exception if you attempt to acquire an pessimistic lock and no transaction is running.

MikroORM currently supports two pessimistic lock modes:

• Pessimistic Write (LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE), locks the underlying database rows for concurrent Read and Write Operations.
• Pessimistic Read (LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_READ), locks other concurrent requests that attempt to update or lock rows in write mode.

You can use pessimistic locks in three different scenarios:

1. Using em.findOne(className, id, { lockMode: LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE }) or em.findOne(className, id, { lockMode: LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_READ })
2. Using em.lock(entity, LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE) or em.lock(entity, LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_READ)
3. Using QueryBuilder.setLockMode(LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_WRITE) or QueryBuilder.setLockMode(LockMode.PESSIMISTIC_READ)

This part of documentation is highly inspired by doctrine internals docs as the behaviour here is pretty much the same.