Release 1.2 introduced the ability to create server-side locks on files, thus serializing commit access to certain resources. While Subversion is still a fundamentally concurrent version control system, certain types of binary files (e.g. art assets) cannot be merged together. The locking feature fulfills the need to version and protect such resources. With locking also came a complete WebDAV auto-versioning implementation, allowing Subversion repositories to be mounted as network folders. Finally, Subversion 1.2 began using a new, faster binary-differencing algorithm to compress and retrieve old versions of files.