Synonyms
Locking granularity and lock types
Definition
Databases are usually organized hierarchically, with tablespaces containing tables, which in turn contain records. In multigranularity locking, this organization is exploited for a more efficient lock management by allowing transactions to lock objects of different granularities like tables or records. Thus, instead of locking each record of a table separately, a transaction can lock the complete table. To ensure a correct execution when transactions use different granularities for locking, additional lock modes are introduced to avoid non-serializable executions.
Key Points
Transactions that acquire many locks on small items like records or pages incur a non-negligible performance and memory overhead for managing these locks. Such transactions can benefit from acquiring locks on coarser granules like tables or complete tablespaces, avoiding many fine-grained locks. However, concurrency may be lower due to an increased number of...
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Recommended Reading
Gray J, Lorie RA, Putzolu GR, Traiger IL. Granularity of locks in a large shared data base. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases; 1975. p. 428–51.
Weikum G, Vossen G. Transactional information systems. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman; 2002.
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Schenkel, R. (2018). Locking Granularity and Lock Types. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_834
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_834
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