When to lock?

[ethridgt]

Hello all,

I'm new to php and mysql. I'm curious when or if I need to lock my tables. I'm creating a dynamically created site that relies on data from the database. For the most part there will only be select, update, and insert queries. Should I lock the tables I'm using on the insert and update queries? I'm assuming that I don't need to lock on the select statements. Thanks in advance for any help.

-- tale

[Anon]

Table locking is only needed if you are going to have lots of people updating data at the same time, and the data is mission critical.

Things like this message phorum don't use table locking because inserts are queued up and put into the database in order of there submission.

I don't think you'll have to work about table locking unless you are doing financial work. The only time I had to lock and tables was when I was building a commission payment routine for stock brokers. The module would take 1 - 5 hours to run to gather and manipulate all of the data needed to get the brokers paid and it needed the data to be un-changing while it was running. Since then I've written some very large data driven web sites and I've never locked another table.

[ethridgt]

So you're saying that the queueing is automatically handled by mysql or whatever other database you're using?

Thanks for you're response.

-- tale