Hiya Ed ---

I believe that this is called "semaphore locking" and was used extensively in some older commercial xBASE products like SBT. It's a great idea for what Matthew is trying to do.

>You may have separate table where application will write/delete entries (primary keys) when it locks/unlocks records. So, you can always have some administrative utility to browse this table and see user's activity. Obviously, it makes sense if you use some flavor of pessimistic buffering scheme.