You are right that using Java atomic types are more efficient than guarding shared data with synchronized methods, but note that all the atomic types are simple types like boolean, int, references, and so on, and making these simple types atomic in databases does not solve the database synchronization problem. For example, considering a simple table with two columns (id integer, name varchar). Making integer and varchar atomic does not means updating a row, which consists of an integer and a varchar, would be atomic. Furthermore, the Atomicity property of DB transactions means that a whole transaction, which may consist of multiple statements and updates of many rows, should be atomic - and that cannot be done easily by simply using atomic types.