MySQL has locking capabilities, for example table and row level locking, and such locks are needed to control data integrity in multi-user concurrency. Deadlocks—where two or more transactions are waiting for one another to give up locks before the transactions can proceed successfully—are an unwanted situation. It is a classic problem for all databases including MySQL/PostgreSQL/Oracle etc. By default, MySQL detects the deadlock condition and to break the deadlock it rolls back one of the transactions.

For a deadlock example, see InnoDB deadlocks

Some misconceptions

There are some misconceptions about deadlocks:

a) Transaction isolation levels are responsible for deadlocks. The possibility of deadlocks is not affected by isolation level. Isolation level changes the behavior of read …

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