A Study of the Effects of Locking Granularity in a Data Base Management System

Summary: Using a simulation model, the study analyzes how lock granularity affects DBMS integrity and concurrency. Contrary to intuition, results favor surprisingly coarse granularity, casting doubt on predicate locking and impacting lock-manager design. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: haadbbba7c0eaeff7
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1977
Pagerank: 0.00010437934
Overall Rank: 1,511 | 89.85%
DOI: 10.1145/509404.509422

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Daniel R. Ries (University of California Berkeley)
2. Michael Stonebraker (University of California Berkeley)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ries_sigmod77,
        title = {{A Study of the Effects of Locking Granularity in a Data Base Management System}},
        author = {Ries, Daniel R. and Stonebraker, Michael},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '77},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/509404.509422},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/509404.509422},
        year = {1977}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,435	Queueing Network Models for Concurrent Transaction Processing in a Database System	1979	SIGMOD	0.00010662789
2,200	Precision Locks	1981	SIGMOD	8.8727857e-05
2,579	Empirical Comparison of Database Concurrency Control Schemes	1983	VLDB	8.2721157e-05
5,931	A Fast General-Purpose Hardware Synchronization Mechanism	1985	SIGMOD	5.9430349e-05
13,541	An Experimental Comparison of Locking Policies in a Testbed Database System	1983	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 0 of 0 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,781	On-the-Fly, Incremental, Consistent Reading of Entire Databases	1985	VLDB
2	4,265	An Abstract Model of Database Concurrency Control Algorithms	1983	SIGMOD
3	4,991	A Quantitative Comparison of Lock Protocols for Centralized Databases	1983	VLDB
4	4,118	A Simple Analytic Model For Performance Of Exclusive Locking In Database Systems	1983	PODS
5	2,973	The Performance of Concurrency Control Algorithms for Database Management Systems	1984	VLDB
6	2,200	Precision Locks	1981	SIGMOD
7	13,541	An Experimental Comparison of Locking Policies in a Testbed Database System	1983	SIGMOD
8	1,716	Concurrency In Database Systems - A Simulation Study	1977	SIGMOD
9	1,435	Queueing Network Models for Concurrent Transaction Processing in a Database System	1979	SIGMOD
10	4,203	Choice and Performance in Locking for Databases	1984	VLDB