C H A P T E R  8

Locking, Transactions, and Concurrency

This chapter discusses some of the methods that PeopleSoft uses to maintain data integrity in a multiuser environment while at the same time avoiding techniques that are specific to a particular database platform.

This chapter begins with a discussion of locking in PeopleSoft. It is useful to understand how and where PeopleSoft locks tables, because this can have implications for the performance and scalability of your applications. I then examine how PeopleSoft uses tables to generate sequence numbers instead of Oracle sequences, in order to maintain platform independence. However, this platform independence has implications for concurrency and scalability. Finally, I cover the row-level locking that occurs during PIA transactions, and how by holding locks for as short a time as possible, PeopleSoft minimizes the impact of the table-based sequences.