Your first ("very unnatural") example is what I had in mind. And since read committed is the default isolation level in most RDBMS, it is prone to the lost upda

Your first ("very unnatural") example is what I had in mind. And since read committed is the default isolation level in most RDBMS, it is prone to the lost update anomaly. (In MySQL, repeatable read is the default, but its implementation of repeatable read doesn't prevent lost updates.) Note I did point out that I'm referring to the default configuration, not the strongest supported isolation level. Although your second example is probably what a human would write, an ORM framework would very likely generate a transaction looking like your first example. Another example would be inserting a transaction into a table, and summing the transactions in the account in order to calculate the account balance. Making that safe requires preventing phantom reads, which means requiring serializability. You say serializable costs very little in most situations. I can't claim to know what most situations are like, but all I know is that I've seen many people who have tried serializable and found it too slow for them. User a-priori gives an example elsewhere on this thread: http://www.michaelmelanson.net/2014/03/20/transactions/ http://www.michaelmelanson.net/2014/03/20/transactions/ My point is that weak isolation is very subtle, easy to get wrong, and you don't know that you got it wrong until it's too late. We need better understanding and better tools so that concurrency is less easy to screw up.