> Somewhere on these newsgroups I recall reading that SQL Server 6 and prior
> (when they were married with Sybase) used page locking and not row level
> locking. Hence you could be locking a lot more records then what you think
> when doing an UPDATE or INSERT SQL.
>
> Now I notice that SQL Server 7 and 2000 claim to use row level locking.
> (As you can see, I have been out of the SQL arena for some time). So
> what I'd like to know if this is all true? Or marketing mumbo-jumbo? Has
> Microsoft made changes at the core of their engine to lock rows? I know
> that other RDMSs like Interbase have a versioning engine so it was built
> from the ground up for concurrence. And I've read that MSs row level
> locking is a band-aid on its unchanged core engine, although the author
> of that message did not expand further on this.

Erland Sommarskog wrote:

> Randall Sell (randall@bytewise.nospam.com.au) writes:
>
>>Somewhere on these newsgroups I recall reading that SQL Server 6 and prior
>>(when they were married with Sybase) used page locking and not row level
>>locking. Hence you could be locking a lot more records then what you think
>>when doing an UPDATE or INSERT SQL.
>>
>>Now I notice that SQL Server 7 and 2000 claim to use row level locking.
>>(As you can see, I have been out of the SQL arena for some time). So
>>what I'd like to know if this is all true? Or marketing mumbo-jumbo? Has
>>Microsoft made changes at the core of their engine to lock rows? I know
>>that other RDMSs like Interbase have a versioning engine so it was built
>>from the ground up for concurrence. And I've read that MSs row level
>>locking is a band-aid on its unchanged core engine, although the author
>>of that message did not expand further on this.
>
>
> That poster may have been thinking of SQL 6.5, which had a bascially
> unchanged engine from 4.x days, but where you could set a table option
> to get "insert row locks" which was good for tables with heavy insert
> frequency at a hot spot.
>
> But that was very long ago. MS shipped SQL7 in the end of 1998, and SQL7
> was almost complete rewrite, and very little of the original Sybase code
> survived. There are still page locks in SQL Server, but I have to confess
> that I don't know when they are used. Row locks and table locks is what
> you usually see. (Table locks when there is no suitable index, or the
> query affects the entire table anyway.)
>
>