>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?)

In SQL Server (and I'm assuming since you posted this in SQL Server that we're talking about SQL Databases), you don't have the same rlock() and flock() that you have in VFP.

In SQL (and other big DBs) you have isolation levels that implement shared locks (for reading) and write locks (for writing)

I'm going to type out some notes here in a few minutes that might help