Are InnoDB Deadlocks exclusive to INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE?

Question

I am Working around MySQL error "Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction".

I am going to have to update a program to allow deadlocks. Is it possible that SELECT statement will produce deadlock errors? I know that it is only a read lock so multiple selects won't be a problem, but what if there is an INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement (with subqueries possible with joins) and a SELECT statement (possible with joins or subqueries)?

Is it possible that the error will be thrown on the SELECT instead of the INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE.

The story is here if you are curious.

Answer 1

The direct answer to your question's title is No.

SELECT queries can perform locks on the gen_clust_index, aka the Clustered Index.

Here are three DBA Stack Exchanges questions I agressively looked over with @RedBlueThing, the person who asked these questions. @RedBlueThing found work arounds for his questions.

• Reasons for occasionally slow queries?
• Trouble deciphering a deadlock in an innodb status log
• Will these two queries result in a deadlock if executed in sequence?

Just to keep your question in perspective, when you look over these answers (don't look too deeply, even I get dizzy looking at my own convoluted answers) it should be quickly apparent that SELECT queries can lock data.

You also have special cases of SELECT where you can lock specific rows on demand.

UPDATE 2011-08-08 16:49 EDT

You asked the variation question : "Are InnoDB deadlock exceptions possibly going to be thrown by SELECT" The answer to that can be Yes under a certain condition. What is that condition ? If just a single SQL statement is rolled back as a result of an error, some of the locks set by the statement may be preserved. This happens because InnoDB stores row locks in a format such that it cannot know afterward which lock was set by which statement.

Based on that statement, the sequences of event to cause this could theoretically be as follows:

• Your SQL UPDATEs a single row but generates an error
• The UPDATE causes a rollback of the one row
• The row has a lingering lock

Personally, that last statement scares me. It would have been nice for MySQL to inform everyone of this quirk. Yet, that statement is from the MySQL Documentation. (Oh yeah, Oracle owns InnoDB)

UPDATE 2015-09-22 18:40 EST

Earlier in the year, I learned that Percona has a cool Nagios check to find these pesky locks hiding behind sleeping connections. All you have to do now is run the code from that link:

SELECT COALESCE(MAX(IF(p.command = 'Sleep', p.time, 0)), 0) AS idle_in_trx
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_LOCK_WAITS AS w
INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_TRX        AS b ON  b.trx_id = w.blocking_trx_id
INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_TRX        AS r ON  r.trx_id = w.requesting_trx_id
LEFT JOIN  INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PROCESSLIST       AS p ON  p.id     = b.trx_mysql_thread_id;

This will only works for MySQL 5.5+. If you have MySQL 5.1 or prior, you must kill all the sleeping connections to release the locks.