>An example of when you might want to do pessimistic record buffering is if, say, two salespeople are talking to customers about the same stock item. If the first one to the stock is "doing a deal" < s > with a customer, the second should be told (IMO) that it's not necessarily available...It hasn't actually been sold out of inventory yet, but he can't really sell it.

This is almost exactly what I'm wanting to do. I've got these forms that are being processed and I want to make sure that if User A is processing a form, User B can't also process it.

Since it appears that all I have in the client/server world is op buffering, any idea how I could accomplish this before User B starts up (and wastes their time).

Thanks for any help. Y'all will please have to forgive these questions, but i'm completely new at this and want to get it done right (although I'm not sure how I'm going to do that by Thursday... but I'll never give up until we walk into the meeting :) ). Thanks again.