Here’s one I keep forgetting – and spending 15 minutes trying to think of the answer before getting to the “deja vu” point again. I’ve finally decided that I’ve got to write the answer down because that will save me about 14 minutes the next time I forget.
Q. In a Statspack or AWR report there is a section titles “Segments by Row Lock Waits”. Why could an index be subject to a Row Lock Wait ?
A. Try inserting into a table from two different sessions (without committing) two rows with the same primary key. The second insert will wait on event enq: TX – row lock contention, and show up in v$lock with a lock request for a TX lock in mode 4. When you issue a commit or rollback on the first session, and the second statement errors or completes (depending on whether you commit or rollback the first session) it will increase the value for row lock waits in v$segstat (and v$segment_statistics) for the index by 1.
There are variations on the theme, of course, but the key feature is uniqueness with one session waiting for another session to commit or rollback on a conflicting value. This includes cases of foreign key constraint checking such as inserting a child for a parent that has been deleted but not committed (and there’s an interesting anomaly with that scenario which – in 10g, at least – reports more row lock waits on the parent PK than you might expect.)
