Application Design is the only Reason for Deadlocks? Think Again

[Updated on 4/20/2013 after feedback from Charles Hooper, Jonathan Lewis, Laurent Schneider and Mohamed Houri and with some minor cosmetic enhancements of outputs]

Have you ever seen a message “ORA-00060: Deadlock detected” and automatically assumed that it was an application coding issue? Well, it may not be. There are DBA-related issues and you may be surprised to find out that INSERTs may cause deadlock. Learn all the conditions that precipitate this error, how to read the "deadlock graph" to determine the cause, and most important: how to avoid it.