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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JEFF GREGERSON who wrote (7227)	5/29/1998 12:46:00 PM
From: AnnieK	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

You asked about 'row-level locking'. I'll take a stab at explaining it in non-technical terms. It's a mechanism that allows a user to grab a row (record) of data to ensure that no one else changes it out from under him. Other users can read the row, but only the user who has it locked can change it. To other users, the row remains as it was before the lock (read-consistency), but once the locking user has changed and committed (made permanent) the change, then everyone querying that particular row will see the new values. Row-level locking was a major improvement of Oracle over all of its competitors at the time (late 1980s) because prior to that, locking was done at the table level. So if a table needed a lot of updates, one user could lock it and effectively prevent any other user from doing updates until the lock was released. This had serious implications for performance. Imagine dozens of order entry clerks trying to update orders at the same time and having to wait until the ORDERS table was released. Hope this helps.