METHOD FOR UPDATING A BLOCK USING RECORD-LEVEL LOCKS BY COMMITTING THE UPDATE IF THE BLOCK HAS NOT BEEN UPDATED BY ANOTHER PROCESS OTHERWISE SPINNING

A Virtual Storage Access Management (VSAM) technique for maintaining data integrity of the record-level shared data in a multiprocessor system environment without the concurrency loss associated with locking at the data Control Interval (CI) or block level. Two or more concurrent processes can update different records within the same VSAM data CI using only a record-level lock. This feature relies upon multiple private data CI copies, Shared External Storage (SES), cache cross-invalidation, and a conditional writing operation. A first process updates a private copy of a data CI containing the target record from SES, logs the changes, and writes the changed data CI back to the SES conditioned upon no update having been made to the same block data CI by a second process in the interim. If a second process has indeed updated the same data CI in the interim, the first process recycles by obtaining the most recent data CI copy from SES, combining it with the first process update log entries and attempting to again conditionally write the modified data CI to SES. This process of logging updates and spinning on an intervening update by another process preserves serialization by record-level locking alone.