These locks are acquired when rows are being updated (or deleted or marked for update). Row-level locks do not affect data querying. They block writers to the same row only.

PostgreSQL does not remember any information about modified rows in memory and so has no limit to the number of rows locked at one time. However, locking a row may cause a disk write; thus, for example, SELECT FOR UPDATE will modify selected rows to mark them and so will result in disk writes.

In addition to table and row locks, short-term share/exclusive locks are used to control read/write access to table pages in the shared buffer pool. These locks are released immediately after a tuple is fetched or updated. Application writers normally need not be concerned with page-level locks, but we mention them for completeness.

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