UPDATE with SELECT, will it lock each row or all SELECTed records

Question

It is unclear to me (by reading MySQL docs) if the following query ran on INNODB tables on MySQL 5.1, would create WRITE LOCK for each of the rows the db updates internally (5000 in total) or LOCK all the rows in the batch. As the database has really heavy load, this is very important.

UPDATE `records`
INNER JOIN (
  SELECT id, name FROM related LIMIT 0, 5000
) AS `j` ON `j`.`id` = `records`.`id` 
SET `name` = `j`.`name`

I'd expect it to be per row but as I do not know a way to make sure it is so, I decided to ask someone with deeper knowledge. If this is not the case and the db would LOCK all the rows in the set, I'd be thankful if you give me explanation why.

Answer 1

The UPDATE is running in transaction - it's an atomic operation, which means that if one of the rows fails (because of unique constrain for example) it won't update any of the 5000 rows. This is one of the ACID properties of a transactional database.

Because of this the UPDATE hold a lock on all of the rows for the entire transaction. Otherwise another transaction can further update the value of a row, based on it's current value (let's say update records set value = value * '2'). This statement should produce different result depending if the first transaction commits or rollbacks. Because of this it should wait for the first transaction to complete all 5000 updates.

If you want to release the locks, just do the update in (smaller) batches.

P.S. autocommit controls if each statement is issued in own transaction, but does not effect the execution of a single query