No matter how many frames are opened or closed during a transaction, all locks are held until the transaction is completed. It is important, therefore, to design the application and its individual transactions to provide the best possible concurrency control.

Concurrency control refers to the management of shared data so that simultaneous users can access and update the data with little or no wait time while data integrity is maintained.

In general, data access and data integrity exist in an inverse relationship. If an application allows all users to access the data at will, then data integrity is severely threatened. If the application holds locks for long periods of time, for example by running as one continuous transaction, then it is difficult for users to share the data. Most application developers try to find a balance that lets multiple users access the data as quickly as possible yet maintain data integrity.