Skip navigation links
12.3.6 SET TRANSACTION Syntax »
Section Navigation      [Toggle]

12.3.5.3. Other Table-Locking Notes

You can safely use KILL to terminate a session that is waiting for a table lock. See Section 12.4.6.3, “KILL Syntax”.

You should not lock any tables that you are using with INSERT DELAYED. An INSERT DELAYED in this case results in an error because the insert must be handled by a separate thread, not by the session which holds the lock.

Normally, you do not need to lock tables, because all single UPDATE statements are atomic; no other session can interfere with any other currently executing SQL statement. However, there are a few cases when locking tables may provide an advantage:

  • If you are going to run many operations on a set of MyISAM tables, it is much faster to lock the tables you are going to use. Locking MyISAM tables speeds up inserting, updating, or deleting on them because MySQL does not flush the key cache for the locked tables until UNLOCK TABLES is called. Normally, the key cache is flushed after each SQL statement.

    The downside to locking the tables is that no session can update a READ-locked table (including the one holding the lock) and no session can access a WRITE-locked table other than the one holding the lock.

  • If you are using tables for a nontransactional storage engine, you must use LOCK TABLES if you want to ensure that no other session modifies the tables between a SELECT and an UPDATE. The example shown here requires LOCK TABLES to execute safely: 

    LOCK TABLES trans READ, customer WRITE;
SELECT SUM(value) FROM trans WHERE customer_id=some_id;
UPDATE customer
  SET total_value=sum_from_previous_statement
  WHERE customer_id=some_id;
UNLOCK TABLES;

    Without LOCK TABLES, it is possible that another session might insert a new row in the trans table between execution of the SELECT and UPDATE statements.

You can avoid using LOCK TABLES in many cases by using relative updates (UPDATE customer SET value=value+new_value) or the LAST_INSERT_ID() function. See Section 1.8.5.2, “Transactions and Atomic Operations”.

You can also avoid locking tables in some cases by using the user-level advisory lock functions GET_LOCK() and RELEASE_LOCK(). These locks are saved in a hash table in the server and implemented with pthread_mutex_lock() and pthread_mutex_unlock() for high speed. See Section 11.10.4, “Miscellaneous Functions”.

See Section 7.3.1, “Internal Locking Methods”, for more information on locking policy.