Locking v/s Multi-Versioning

Locking is a means of not allowing any other transaction to take place when one is already in progress. In this the data is locked and there won’t be any modification taking place till the transaction either gets successful or it fails. The lock has to be put up before the processing of the data whereas Multi-Versioning is an alternate to locking to control the concurrency. It provides easy way to view and modify the data. It allows two users to view and read the data till the transaction is in progress. Multiversion concurrency control is described in some detail in the 1981 paper “Concurrency Control in Distributed Database Systems” by Philip Bernstein and Nathan Goodman.
Multi-Versioning, As the name implies, each record in the system might have multiple versions visible to different transactions. When a transaction modifies a record, a new version is written to the database, and a previous version, representing only the difference between the version of the record that was read by the transaction and the new value of the record, is written as a back version of that record.
Read committed isolation using row versioning is somewhere in between Locks and Multi-Versioning. Under this isolation level, read operations do not acquire locks against the active live data. However, with update operations the process is the same for this isolation level as it is for the default read committed isolation level, The selection of rows to update is done by using a blocking scan where an update lock is taken on the data row as data values are read.
Snapshot isolation uses purely Multi-Versioning because data that is to be modified is not actually locked in advance, but the data is locked when it is selected for modification. When a data row meets the update criteria, the snapshot transaction verifies that the data has not been modified by another transaction after the snapshot transaction started. If the data has not been modified by another transaction, the snapshot transaction locks the data, updates the data, releases the lock, and moves on. If the data has been modified by another transaction, an update conflict occurs and the snapshot transaction rolls back.
Although locking can be the best concurrency-control choice for applications that require data consistency and inter-transaction protection, it can cause writers to block readers. If a transaction changes a row, another transaction cannot read the row until the writer commits. There are cases where waiting for the change to complete is the correct response; however, there are cases where the previous transactionally consistent state of the row is enough.