Techniques have been developed whereby lock state sharing can be extended
to provide a low-space overhead lock management facility with comprehensive support
for bulk lock delegation. Operating in conjunction with delegation request validation
methods, the techniques provide an efficient bulk lock delegation facility for
many advanced transaction models. Some implementations in accordance with the present
invention provide bulk lock delegation with computational costs that are generally
independent of the number of locks being delegated. Accordingly, such implementations
may be particularly attractive for systems that demand for fine-granularity locking,
large transaction sizes (in term of number of locks acquired), and efficient delegation mechanisms.