Folks,

Coming from the Foxpro World, I have always been able to implement such things as licensing by using explicit record locks that were completely independent of other locks and transactions within a Fox session.

Seems that if I want to give up the Fox licensing table, I cannot really do this in SQL. As I understand things, a lock is inside a Transaction, and I cannot maintain simultaneous transactions within a connection. Of course I do not want two connections per session, because then the client has to pay for them.

So I am wondering how to maintain a limited user count in the C/S World. I'd like to give up my Fox table, but near as I can tell, SQL Server is not going to replace it with an analogous mechanism. Moreover, C/S thinking in general does not seem to promote such things as licensing.

So can anyone point me in the right direction for creating necessary "bottlenecks?" My two working examples at the moment are run-time licenses and certain processes that can only be run by one person at a time.

Ideally, I'd like to be completely LAN-independent. I picture the guy on the road in the hotel room, plugging in through DSL and having the full functionality, but having concurrent users and exclusive processes still be centrally managed.

TIA...