Patent ID: 7529749

Claim:
A method for locking data objects in a computer system, the method comprising: receiving, with a lock service module, a request from a first processing module to lock data objects located in memory of the computer system for access for further data processing modules by creating lock objects for the data objects; receiving, with the lock service module, names of key fields of the data objects to be locked; receiving, with the lock service module, values for each of the key fields of the data objects to be locked; receiving, with the lock service module, a maximum number of locks to be used to lock the data objects, wherein the maximum number of locks is greater than zero; checking, with the lock service module, whether a number of the data objects to be locked is less than or equal to the maximum number of locks; creating, when the number of the data objects to be locked is less than or equal to the maximum number of locks, one or more lock objects comprising each of the names and values for each of the key fields; and when the number of the data objects to be locked is greater than the maximum number of locks, performing the following steps: determining, for each of the key fields, a quantity of different values for each key field determining consecutively, for each key field, whether the quantity of different values is less than or equal to the maximum number of locks; and creating one or more lock objects comprising the names and values of the key fields where the quantity is less than the maximum number of locks, and comprising wildcards for remaining key fields where the quantity is greater than the maximum number of locks.