Also, there is an excellent discussion of this in Tom Kytes, expert oracle database architecture book. Topics include such things as comparing Transaction Isolation Levels between some DBMS's, locking, and concurrency. A great book for developers, (and DBA's). Transaction Isolation Levels -- Read uncommitted, read committed, repatable read, serializable, read only... Joel Patterson Database Administrator 904 727-2546 -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Paul Harrison Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 2:53 PM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Locking Hi All, Let's say I have 2 sessions open... session one updates a table and does not commit and can view the new updated data. session 2 is able to read the old data. How can session 2 read the old data if session 1 has an exclusive write lock on the table. Exclusive lock happens when updating a table? Thanks, Paul -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l