adjacent key locking

Since you are using online, it is unlikely that adjacent key locking is causing the problem, especially if it is happening regularly. I would suspect that you have a process running that locks the table, or you have the table setup as PAGE locking (default). With page locking, you are more likely to get conflicts if the table has few rows and the rowsize is small (the more rows there are on the page, the more that will be locked by a page lock). As a general rule, I use page locking on tables which are: 1) Lookup tables. 2) Large row size (usually where no more than 5 rows/page). 3) Very large tables (depends on how the table is accessed). Take into account the fact that isolation levels will influence the degree of locking. Committed/Dirty use the least locks. Mark MarkDenham@aol.com (home) Denham.M@amstr.com (work) --------------------------( Forwarded letter 1 follows )--------------------- Date: Friday, 6 June 1997 5:26am From: "Nicholas Allon" <ok90@dial.pipex.com> To: <Denham.M@amstr.com> Subject: adjacent key locking Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 13:28:47 +0100 Reply-To: ok90@dial.pipex.com Thank for returning my enquiry. The message that we got via our error handler was as follows -243 SQL statement error number -243. Could not position within a table (informix.appcse_stat) ISAM error: Lock Timeout Expired Hope this is what you required Nicholas