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 FOR SHARE:

SELECT * FROM parent WHERE NAME = 'Jones' FOR SHARE;

After the FOR SHARE 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, FOR SHARE 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.

If a row is locked by a transaction, a SELECT ... FOR UPDATE or SELECT ... FOR SHARE transaction that requests the same locked row must wait until the blocking transaction releases the row lock. This behavior prevents transactions from updating or deleting rows that are queried for updates by other transactions. However, waiting for a row lock to be released is not necessary if you want the query to return immediately when a requested row is locked, or if excluding locked rows from the result set is acceptable.

To avoid waiting for other transactions to release row locks, NOWAIT and SKIP LOCKED options may be used with SELECT ... FOR UPDATE or SELECT ... FOR SHARE locking read statements.

NOWAIT and SKIP LOCKED only apply to row-level locks.

Statements that use NOWAIT or SKIP LOCKED are unsafe for statement based replication.

The following example demonstrates NOWAIT and SKIP LOCKED. Session 1 starts a transaction that takes a row lock on a single record. Session 2 attempts a locking read on the same record using the NOWAIT option. Because the requested row is locked by Session 1, the locking read returns immediately with an error. In Session 3, the locking read with SKIP LOCKED returns the requested rows except for the row that is locked by Session 1.

# Session 1:

mysql> CREATE TABLE t (i INT, PRIMARY KEY (i)) ENGINE = InnoDB;

mysql> INSERT INTO t (i) VALUES(1),(2),(3);

mysql> START TRANSACTION;

mysql> SELECT * FROM t WHERE i = 2 FOR UPDATE;
+---+
| i |
+---+
| 2 |
+---+

# Session 2:

mysql> START TRANSACTION;

mysql> SELECT * FROM t WHERE i = 2 FOR UPDATE NOWAIT;
ERROR 3572 (HY000): Do not wait for lock.

# Session 3:

mysql> START TRANSACTION;

mysql> SELECT * FROM t FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED;
+---+
| i |
+---+
| 1 |
| 3 |
+---+