JDBCs setMaxRows and the SELECT … FOR UPDATE clause

Today following question came up: Would the JDBC driver of Oracle regonize it, when you set the setMaxRows and perform a SELECT using the FOR UPDATE clause. Example: You’ve a table with 40 rows. Now you call setMaxRows(20) so that you only would get the first 20 rows and perform the select without any where clause (I know, not really a pretty solution: Instead of using rownum, you would select all rows and just stop fetching at the 21th row, but however). Would you now lock all 40 rows or just 20. Well, the answer is (I’ve expected it): You get a row lock on the entry table, not only the first 20 lines. With rownum in the where clause it is now problem. You just lock the selected 20 rows and the other 20 are available for other transactions. So developers: Use the rownum pseudo column instead of the setMaxRows function specially if you perform a select… for update!

But the nicest thing on this little test: I wrote my first Java code since 4 years! 🙂