[vvern]

Still, I think it’s the right default to start with serializable. Then when you have performance issues you can think long and hard about whether relaxed isolation levels will work in a big free way. Better to start with a correct application.

[lateforwork]

Starting with serializable is not free, there is a coding cost to pay to handle all the concurrency errors.

[magicalhippo]

Sybase SQLAnywhere implements (or at least did) strict serialization by taking an exclusive row lock on all rows... which you can imagine scales horribly for a table with a reasonable row count.

I found out the hard way at work. I had assumed it took an exclusive lock on the table level only, the documentation didn't really spell out the details of how it enforced the serialized access.

I changed it to a retry loop which worked fine and was fairly easy to implement all things considered. Not gonna reach for strict serialization again unless I have to.