Abstract: In this paper we present an optimization that can significantly enhance the concurrency provided by row level locking in some RDBMSs. With this optimization, the degree of concurrency obtained is comparable to that in column level locking in some cases that are common at customer sites. Besides, this optimization does not increase the overhead of concurrency control significantly. We use the term pseudo column level locking (PCLL) for row level locking enhanced with this optimization. While some versioning based concurrency control schemes may offer better concurrency than PCLL, they are usually hard to incorporate in an RDBMS that relies on locking for concurrency control. Our technique is simple to implement, and it has been implemented in Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE).