Details
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Improvement
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Status: Open
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Major
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Resolution: Unresolved
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None
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None
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Normal
Description
The documentation in http://db.apache.org/derby/docs/10.4/ref/rrefsqlj41360.html#rrefsqlj41360__sqlj15384 says that SELECT ... FOR UPDATE cannot be used in many situations (e.g. when ORDER BY is present or when JOINs are used). I can very well understand that the current implementation using updatable cursors is very hard to implement when multiple tables are used and therefore these restrictions are probably necessary.
However, besides that functionality, "FOR UPDATE" is extremely useful for transactional integrity: For example, we - http://www.jfire.org - use transaction isolation level read committed, because it provides good transaction safety combined with good performance. When modifying records, we first select the appropriate table rows with a SELECT FOR UPDATE in order to guarantee that the data we just read cannot be manipulated by another transaction while we are working with it.
I do not see any reason why this locking behaviour should not be possible for certain queries. Therefore, I recommend to introduce a configuration setting (maybe a system property? or an option passed to the JDBC-URL?) that disables updatable queries completely (we don't need them anyway and probably it improves performance when not using them). With this option set, the SELECT ... FOR UPDATE should solely affect locks on rows - and work with all SELECT expressions - no matter whether they use JOIN, UNION, ORDER BY etc..