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Asked: 2026-05-11T02:38:28+00:00

I want to implement an atomic transaction like the following: BEGIN TRAN A SELECT

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I want to implement an atomic transaction like the following:

BEGIN TRAN A  SELECT id FROM Inventory WITH (???) WHERE material_id = 25 AND quantity > 10  /* Process some things using the inventory record and eventually write some updates that are dependent on the fact that that specific inventory record had sufficient quantity (greater than 10). */  COMMIT TRAN A

The problem is that there are other transactions happening that consume quantity from our inventory, so between the time that the record is selected and the updates are written in transaction A that record could become an invalid selection because it’s quantity might have been lowered below the threshold in the WHERE clause.

So the question is what locking hints should I use in the WITH clause to prevent the selected inventory record from being changed before I finish my updates and commit the transaction?

EDIT: So thanks to John, a good solution seems to be to set the transaction isolation level to REPEATABLE READ. This will will make sure that ‘no other transactions can modify data that has been read by the current transaction until the current transaction completes.’

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1 Answer

  1. You may actually be better off setting the transaction isolation level rather than using a query hint.

    The following reference from Books Online provides details of each of the different Isolation levels.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx

    Here is good article that explains the various types of locking behaviour in SQL Server and provides examples too.

    http://www.sqlteam.com/article/introduction-to-locking-in-sql-server

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