How It Works
Concurrency control
The rules a database uses so that many people or programs can read and change data at the same time without corrupting it — for example, stopping two people from booking the last seat on a flight.
Origin
A core topic of database research from the 1970s. Eswaran, Gray, Lorie and Traiger's 1976 paper 'The Notions of Consistency and Predicate Locks in a Database System' set out two-phase locking, and Jim Gray's later work on transactions earned him the 1998 Turing Award.