Comment by magicalhippo

Sybase SQLAnywhere implements (or at least did) strict serialization by taking an exclusive row lock on all rows... which you can imagine scales horribly for a table with a reasonable row count.

I found out the hard way at work. I had assumed it took an exclusive lock on the table level only, the documentation didn't really spell out the details of how it enforced the serialized access.

I changed it to a retry loop which worked fine and was fairly easy to implement all things considered. Not gonna reach for strict serialization again unless I have to.