In DB2 on z/OS, you can deny lock escalation (Allow row level locks to be acquired until resources are consumed and not escalate locks from row level to a table level) by setting LOCKMAX=0 in CREATE or ALTER table space.
Can you do same thing on DB2 on distributed platform – Linux, Unix and Windows (LUW)?
You can achieve similar results by using newer Self Tuning Memory Manager (STMM) capability in DB2 9 by setting LOCKLIST and MAXLOCKS to AUTOMATIC. This will not guarantee that lock escalation will not occur as STMM has a safety mechanism that will not allow the LOCKLIST to consume all the resources. But having a large DATABASE_MEMORY value will allow the maximum size of LOCKLIST to be quite large, thus accommodating many locks and minimizing the probability of escalation of locks.