Abstract: A data processing system and method which manages lock requests at both the transaction and process levels. A lock manager allocates one lock request block (LRB) per process and identifies the ownership of the lock by storing process, transaction and shared IDs in the LRB. The process ID is used to identify which lock to release when a process wants to release the lock before transaction commit while the transaction ID is used to identify all locks to be released at the commit/roll back time of the transaction. The shared ID is a unique value which identifies the lock. The LRB also has a granted transaction mode (GTM) field which stores a value representing the upper bound of the lock modes granted to the transaction. Whenever a lock is granted or released, the GTM of the transaction is recomputed.