Record-Level Locking

Many customers regularly upload large amounts of data to the service, and maintain integrations with other systems that update their data in scheduled batches or continuously in real time. Like other transactional systems, the Lightning Platform platform employs record-level database locking to preserve the integrity of data during these updates. The locks are held very briefly and don’t present the same performance risks as some of the other organization locks. However, they can still cause updates to fail, so customers must still be careful not to run updates to the same collections of records in multiple threads.

In addition to taking this standard precaution, developers and administrators should know that when they are updating child records in Salesforce, the system locks the parent and the child records to prevent inconsistencies, such as updating a child record whose parent has just been deleted in another thread. When objects being processed have a parent-child relationship, two situations in particular pose a risk of producing locking errors.

Because Salesforce holds these locks very briefly, customers who are experiencing a small number of locking errors might be able to handle the problem by adding retry logic to their integration code. Customers who experience frequent locking from integrations and mass updates should sequence batches so that the same records are not updated in multiple threads simultaneously.