STILL WRITING... To some extent, yes. When it comes to InnoDB, you can choose what rows can get locked. It is not so much a particular setting. It is a specific query you have to call. - SELECT ... FOR UPDATE - SELECT ... LOCK IN SHARE MODE This can initiate exclusive or shared row locks based on the result set of those SELECTs. You can find more on this in the [**MySQL Documentation**][1]. I wrote easrlier posts on using these: - http://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/10010/lock-in-share-mode/10017#10017 [1]: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-locking-reads.html