US Patent 7617180 Efficient lock management

A current transaction accessing a data object is disclosed. Accessing could include determining that previous transaction information about a previous transaction is associated with the data object, determining that the previous transaction no longer needs a lock on the data object, and associating current transaction information about the current transaction with the data object. Accessing could include determining that an embedded lock is active, copying the embedded lock to a shared lock region, invalidating the embedded lock, and queuing the current transaction in the shared lock region.