>I need to retrieve a record out of a queue, and I want to lock it to make sure that only one user retrieves and is working on a record at a time.
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>I don't think this is a complicated concept, but I've never done it before. Can somebody give me a crash course on what I'm looking for? I'm going to have a status on the record of Pending/Done I think to explicitly mark that the record has been processed, but I need to work on the locking part. This is the requirement that was provided to me:
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>This action must be safe across multiple webservers, meaning no 2 users could possibly receive the same row at the same time (atomic operation? Cross-database locking?)

Such pessimistic approaches are usually bad. What you can do instead is permit two people to get a record, and deny the save of the last one to click save.

Or the first person to start the record marks it pending with their userid. If they lose the connection, only they can re-access the record. Any record without an id is available to be received.