13.3.5.1. Interaction of Table Locking and Transactions

LOCK TABLES is not transaction-safe and implicitly commits any active transaction before attempting to lock the tables.

UNLOCK TABLES implicitly commits any active transaction, but only if LOCK TABLES has been used to acquire table locks. For example, in the following set of statements, UNLOCK TABLES releases the global read lock but does not commit the transaction because no table locks are in effect:

FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;START TRANSACTION;SELECT ... ;UNLOCK TABLES;

Beginning a transaction (for example, with START TRANSACTION) implicitly commits any current transaction and releases existing table locks.

FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK acquires a global read lock and not table locks, so it is not subject to the same behavior as LOCK TABLES and UNLOCK TABLES with respect to table locking and implicit commits. For example, START TRANSACTION does not release the global read lock. See Section 13.7.6.3, "FLUSH Syntax".

Other statements that implicitly cause transactions to be committed do not release existing table locks. For a list of such statements, see Section 13.3.3, "Statements That Cause an Implicit Commit".

The correct way to use LOCK TABLES and UNLOCK TABLES with transactional tables, such as InnoDB tables, is to begin a transaction with SET autocommit = 0 (not START TRANSACTION) followed by LOCK TABLES, and to not call UNLOCK TABLES until you commit the transaction explicitly. For example, if you need to write to table t1 and read from table t2, you can do this:

SET autocommit=0;LOCK TABLES t1 WRITE, t2 READ, ...;...
                    do something with tables t1 and t2 here ...COMMIT;UNLOCK TABLES;

When you call LOCK TABLES, InnoDB internally takes its own table lock, and MySQL takes its own table lock. InnoDB releases its internal table lock at the next commit, but for MySQL to release its table lock, you have to call UNLOCK TABLES. You should not have autocommit = 1, because then InnoDB releases its internal table lock immediately after the call of LOCK TABLES, and deadlocks can very easily happen. InnoDB does not acquire the internal table lock at all if autocommit = 1, to help old applications avoid unnecessary deadlocks.

ROLLBACK does not release table locks.