How to View Table Locks in AWS RDS (Quick & Easy Guide)

Table locks happen when one database session prevents other sessions from accessing a table or rows within it. AWS RDS makes it fairly easy to identify locking sessions.

Goto your RDS dashboard.

Inside the RDS dashboard:

Click on DB Instances
Select sessions in the database instance you want to inspect

Navigate to the Performance Insights tab
Look for the Sessions section

This is where you can monitor active database sessions and detect locking activity in real time.

If there are any table locks, they will appear as ‘LCK_’

These table locks can be clicked on and you can see details such as:

Which queries are causing the lock

Which sessions are waiting

Lock duration

Database activity related to the lock