I regularly query CONFIGURATION and INFORMATION tables.

My systems don't have masses of users, but they do report "cannot lock the Session manager..." errors from time to time. Usually they just have to refresh a view and everything works fine, but it is obviously a bug.

From reading Ian's post I am wondering whether the errors might result from my queries causing locks.

Is there anywhere I can read about how queries to the CONFIG or INFO databases work?

If they do cause locks I might do something similar to Ian's solution and create some sort of "SystemValues" data-table at start up with a single call to CONFIG and INFO.