So this comes out of Andy Pavlo's group. He teaches an undergrad and graduate level database class each year, and makes nearly all of his course materials avail

So this comes out of Andy Pavlo's group. He teaches an undergrad and graduate level database class each year, and makes nearly all of his course materials available (there's some guest lectures that don't want to be public sadly): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/ I'd definitely go through the slide decks on concurrency control in both of these classes. They're an amazing resource for anyone interested in database internals. There's a ton of tradeoffs, and a lot of prior research into them. Andy's slide decks are something of a road map to the different choices. What you describe is roughly snapshot isolation, which mostly works, but is vulnerable to write skew.