question

If the data is already committed to the table, why are you trying to isolate it from other read operations? Just curious.

Are you modifying the row?

No John, I am just selecting the row from the table.

I too am curious to know like @JohnM here. What exactly do you want to achieve from the case above?

To join the group of curious, I can also tell that I ain't the faintest why you need it. If you really, really like blocking the other transactions from reading the data while the first transaction selected them, then you can try to lock the whole table with exclusive lock so nobody can read any rows until the first transaction is done, try this: open 2 SSMS query windows. In the first window, begin transaction and select the data with x lock: begin tran; select * from SomeTable with (tablockx); In the second window, try to run the select: select * from SomeTable You will see that the second window keeps "executing" without returning any rows. Go back to the first window and rollback tran; -- or -- commit tran; -- does not matter which one Once you executed rollback (or commit or just closed the first window or kill the session), the select statement in the second window will return requested rows. I cannot post this as an answer because after reading it, someone will surely think WHY? WHY? WHY?