Adaptive Server sets a demand lock to indicate that a transaction is next in the queue to lock a table, page, or row. Since many readers can all hold shared locks on a given page, row, or table, tasks that require exclusive locks are queued after a task that already holds a shared lock. Adaptive Server allows up to three readers’ tasks to skip over a queued update task.
After a write transaction has been skipped over by three tasks or families (in the case of queries running in parallel) that acquire shared locks, Adaptive Server gives a demand lock to the write transaction. Any subsequent requests for shared locks are queued behind the demand lock, as shown in Figure 2-4.
As soon as the readers queued ahead of the demand lock release their locks, the write transaction acquires its lock and is allowed to proceed. The read transactions queued behind the demand lock wait for the write transaction to finish and release its exclusive lock.
