If you are bored this weekend, you can take a look at the table locks doc, that I attached at HBASE-7305.
There has been a lot of confusion about the current status, design and implementation, for which I take the blame. Hope these notes help to answer the questions. If not, leave a note here, and I'll update the doc to incorporate the answer. https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/attachment/12571721/HBaseTableLocks.pdf Cheers, Enis
