Question

I need to design a real-time product stock management engine (C# & WCF) but i don’t know how to proceed in order to handle concurrency access and data integrity.

Here is some of the features the engine should be handle :

1. Stock Incoming products
2. Order preparation
3. Move products from one place to another
4. …

May i use MSMQ in order to ensure correct stock count (Messages processed in order by message pooling) or may i use application thread locking.

Note that my application have to be in Real-Time, preparer have to know in real-time how many products there are in stock in time. If there is lack of products at picking he can send a “request” to an operator.

Answer 1

you should probably use an SQL database as Lee says. If you use a transaction to e.g. store an order and decrease available product counts (both in the same transaction) the database guarantees atomicity. You probably also want some kind of concurrency mechanism (like a row version) to prevent inconsistent values (1st process reads, 2nd process updates the same value, then 1st process updates too overwriting the previous update based on outdated values).