Database management systems today face a rising demand for higher transaction rates and shorter response time. One of the essential requirements for meeting this demand is appropriate operating system support for database management functions. This paper proposes the introduction of the concept of “consistency-preserving containers” into data management in order to improve data management support for database management. Moreover, it presents the formal definition of a transactionoriented interface between data management and database management based on this concept, and introduces a locking scheme allowing high concurrency of transactions while guaranteeing consistency. Logging and recovery aspects of the concept are discussed.