How would you design safe retries for transient errors like deadlocks or lock timeouts?

Problem Statement

Explanation

First, make each unit idempotent: the same unit can run again without double effects. Use natural or surrogate keys to detect duplicates and upserts where possible. Log correlation IDs so you can spot duplicates. Next, implement bounded exponential backoff with jitter. On specific transient codes, roll back, wait, and retry a few times. Keep the unit small and consistent in resource order to reduce collisions. If retries exhaust, surface a controlled failure and alert.

Code Solution

SolutionRead Only

for attempt in 1..5 {
  BEGIN; -- do work
  if success COMMIT; else ROLLBACK; sleep(backoff(attempt)+jitter);
}

Practice Sets

This question appears in the following practice sets:

Transactions, Concurrency & Isolation

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How would you design safe retries for transient errors like deadlocks or lock timeouts?

Problem Statement

Explanation

Code Solution

Practice Sets

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Master Interviews Anywhere, Anytime

How would you design safe retries for transient errors like deadlocks or lock timeouts?

Problem Statement

Explanation

Code Solution

Practice Sets

Related Questions

Which SQL statement retrieves all columns and rows from a table named employees?

Which clause filters rows before aggregation and affects which rows are grouped?

What is the default sort order when ORDER BY is used without ASC or DESC?

Which construct is commonly used to paginate results in SQL engines like Postgres and MySQL?

Which predicate correctly checks for missing values in standard SQL?

More from SQL & Databases

Master Interviews
Anywhere, Anytime