MySQL 5.6 Reference Manual Including MySQL NDB Cluster 7.3-7.4 Reference Guide
If you query data and then insert or update related data within
the same transaction, the regular SELECT
statement does not give enough protection. Other transactions
can update or delete the same rows you just queried.
InnoDB
supports two types of
locking reads that
offer extra safety:
Sets a shared mode lock on any rows that are read. Other sessions can read the rows, but cannot modify them until your transaction commits. If any of these rows were changed by another transaction that has not yet committed, your query waits until that transaction ends and then uses the latest values.
For index records the search encounters, locks the rows and
any associated index entries, the same as if you issued an
UPDATE
statement for those rows. Other
transactions are blocked from updating those rows, from
doing SELECT ... LOCK IN SHARE MODE
, or
from reading the data in certain transaction isolation
levels. Consistent reads ignore any locks set on the records
that exist in the read view. (Old versions of a record
cannot be locked; they are reconstructed by applying
undo logs on an
in-memory copy of the record.)
These clauses are primarily useful when dealing with tree-structured or graph-structured data, either in a single table or split across multiple tables. You traverse edges or tree branches from one place to another, while reserving the right to come back and change any of these “pointer” values.
All locks set by LOCK IN SHARE MODE
and
FOR UPDATE
queries are released when the
transaction is committed or rolled back.
Locking reads are only possible when autocommit is disabled
(either by beginning transaction with
START
TRANSACTION
or by setting
autocommit
to 0.
A locking read clause in an outer statement does not lock the
rows of a table in a nested subquery unless a locking read
clause is also specified in the subquery. For example, the
following statement does not lock rows in table
t2
.
SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE c1 = (SELECT c1 FROM t2) FOR UPDATE;
To lock rows in table t2
, add a locking read
clause to the subquery:
SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE c1 = (SELECT c1 FROM t2 FOR UPDATE) FOR UPDATE;
Suppose that you want to insert a new row into a table
child
, and make sure that the child row has
a parent row in table parent
. Your
application code can ensure referential integrity throughout
this sequence of operations.
First, use a consistent read to query the table
PARENT
and verify that the parent row
exists. Can you safely insert the child row to table
CHILD
? No, because some other session could
delete the parent row in the moment between your
SELECT
and your INSERT
,
without you being aware of it.
To avoid this potential issue, perform the
SELECT
using LOCK IN
SHARE MODE
:
SELECT * FROM parent WHERE NAME = 'Jones' LOCK IN SHARE MODE;
After the LOCK IN SHARE MODE
query returns
the parent 'Jones'
, you can safely add the
child record to the CHILD
table and commit
the transaction. Any transaction that tries to acquire an
exclusive lock in the applicable row in the
PARENT
table waits until you are finished,
that is, until the data in all tables is in a consistent
state.
For another example, consider an integer counter field in a
table CHILD_CODES
, used to assign a unique
identifier to each child added to table
CHILD
. Do not use either consistent read or
a shared mode read to read the present value of the counter,
because two users of the database could see the same value for
the counter, and a duplicate-key error occurs if two
transactions attempt to add rows with the same identifier to
the CHILD
table.
Here, LOCK IN SHARE MODE
is not a good
solution because if two users read the counter at the same
time, at least one of them ends up in deadlock when it
attempts to update the counter.
To implement reading and incrementing the counter, first
perform a locking read of the counter using FOR
UPDATE
, and then increment the counter. For example:
SELECT counter_field FROM child_codes FOR UPDATE; UPDATE child_codes SET counter_field = counter_field + 1;
A SELECT ... FOR
UPDATE
reads the latest available data, setting
exclusive locks on each row it reads. Thus, it sets the same
locks a searched SQL UPDATE
would set on the rows.
The preceding description is merely an example of how
SELECT ... FOR
UPDATE
works. In MySQL, the specific task of
generating a unique identifier actually can be accomplished
using only a single access to the table:
UPDATE child_codes SET counter_field = LAST_INSERT_ID(counter_field + 1); SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID();
The SELECT
statement merely
retrieves the identifier information (specific to the current
connection). It does not access any table.