Rhino Service Bus comes with two default implementations of saga persistence (OptimisticDistributedHashTableSagaSatePersister  & DistributedHashTableSagaSatePersister). Both of them rely on the Rhino DHT to actually handle the persistence, but they have quite a different behavior when you start looking at them.

The persistence mechanism is the same, but the difference between them is how they handle concurrency. OptimisticDistributedHashTableSagaSatePersister is very simple to reason about, it uses optimistic concurrency. If you have a concurrency conflict, it will throw and force re-evaluation of the message. You need to opt in to the OptimisticDistributedHashTableSagaSatePersister by extending the marker interface SupportsOptimisticConcurrency.

DistributedHashTableSagaSatePersister is a more complex concurrency solution, which will never lose a write, even if there is a conflict. This requires you to implement merge conflict resolution. It is significantly more complex, and is probably only worth it where you really care about writes always succeeding.

In order to use DistributedHashTableSagaSatePersister properly, your saga needs to implement Orchestrate<MergeSagaState>, that allow the saga to take action upon merges. In addition to that, you need to implement ISagaStateMerger for your particular saga state. This is where the logic for doing the merge is located.