Difference between a row lock and a table lock in Oracle database

Question

What is the difference between row locking and table locking in Oracle Database? Would a for loop with the UPDATE statement trigger a table lock?

Answer 1

Any DML statement on a table is going to acquire a table lock. But it is terribly unlikely that this table lock is going to affect another session in a way that limits concurrency. When your session updates rows, there will be a row exclusive table lock which will stop another session from doing DDL on the table (say, adding or removing a column) while there are active, uncommitted transactions involving the table. But presumably, you're not generally trying to modify the structure of the table at the same time that you're updating rows in the table (or understand that when you deploy these DDL changes that you'll block other sessions for a short period of time and you're picking your deployment times accordingly).

The specific rows that you are updating will be locked in order to prevent another session from modifying those rows until your transaction either commits or rolls back. Those row level locks are generally the locks that cause performance and scalability issues. Ideally, your code would be structured to hold the locks for as little time as possible (updating data in sets is much faster than doing row-by-row updates) and to minimize the probability that two sessions will try to update the same row simultaneously.