We use optimistic versioning, with a dedicated "version" field (that is actually always pulled out of the blob in all tables).
Classic fine-grained schemas are not that much different. A lot of high-level ORM frameworks simply save all the objects' fields on update, without doing fine-grained diffs.
In addition, our frontend apps also support offline mode. They can get all the relevant objects, and then operate on them locally. So our API was designed from the start to deal with conflicts.
> We use optimistic versioning, with a dedicated "version" field (that is actually always pulled out of the blob in all tables).
All well and good but you do need to handle failures elegantly in code. The nice thing about flat DB tables and SQL is you don't really have to care if your goal is to update a single column authoritatively. The state of the other values in the table are, often, immaterial. It gets even more complicated reconciling deeply nested conflicts in open schemas.
Not knocking your approach, it's just a trade-off I guess.
Classic fine-grained schemas are not that much different. A lot of high-level ORM frameworks simply save all the objects' fields on update, without doing fine-grained diffs.
In addition, our frontend apps also support offline mode. They can get all the relevant objects, and then operate on them locally. So our API was designed from the start to deal with conflicts.