After doing some homework on the subject, i found that if i want mysql to do a select without waiting for a lock, i should run :
"SET SESSION TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED"
before my query.
In theory, this should work like SELECT NOLOCK.
In practice I might be missing something as looking at show processlist I still see :
"Waiting for table level lock"
What am i missing?
You ask to read uncommitted changes, this doesn't imply the table is not locked.
What it does mean, however, is that once the table is unlocked by the process changing it, you will be able to read data which hasn't seen a COMMIT.