[slaymaker1907]

After reading the post a bit more carefully, I think livelock is impossible since transactions are only aborted if one or more read pages have been modified since they were read. That implies forward progress must be made another transaction in order for a transaction to be aborted.

However, unless they do some very careful accounting, this sounds equivalent to snapshot isolation which has anomalies not found with serializable isolation, though the chance of this happening is reduced by using page level locking.

[jgraettinger1]

Right, unless they’re marking non-leaf pages as “read” — which would imply marking the root — it would have to be snapshot, right?

Otherwise you can’t properly abort the txn because a “select x where y” that was previously empty, no longer is.