In what situations is it preferable to use the pessimistic locking mechanism to ensure data consistency?

Pessimistic locking is used in situations where the likelihood of conflicts during concurrent data access is high and the consequences of such conflicts are critical. For example:

• In banking systems when updating account balances to prevent double spending.
• In reservation systems where it is important to ensure that a resource is not booked simultaneously by multiple users.
• In cases where operations take a long time and data should not change during execution.

Pessimistic locking guarantees that while one thread is working with the data, others will wait, preventing race conditions and ensuring data integrity.