What is the difference between a lock and a latch in the context of concurrent access to a database?

Question

I am trying to understand a paper on concurrent B-tree, in which the author mentioned latch vs lock, and how latches do not need a \"Lock Manager\". I have been trying to figure

Answer 1

Another name for a latch is 'spin lock'. It's a simple 'while loop' until bit will be zero (depending on implementation). The execution thread is never asleep while the latch is not available. No any queue. A spin lock is useful for short-time memory object locking, but wasteful if held for a longer duration. See the "Spinlock" article on Wikipedia

Locks are usually supported by the system and in case that they are taken, your thread will be put to sleep so it won't consume any processor resources. Each lock keeps an internal queue of all suspended threads.

The lock manager is the subsystem that can provide you as spin locks as heavyweight locks for concurrency support.

See also the article by Tom Kyte about latches and locks.