The only reason I have ever seen for pessimistic record locks is when you do not want any other user to be able to edit records simultaneously. Instead, you only want the record to be open for editing by one user at a time and you want users to be notified that another user has that record open for editing. This requires scrolling records in a non-locked status and the user must be forced to click on an 'edit' button of course instead of having records open for editing as you step through a table. This is the approach typically taken by the government and all of my apps for them used pessimistic buffering. I have actually found it much more reliable than opportunistic locking because there is never any need to go back and see why 'jane changed fielda and brian changed fieldb when if brian knew that jane was going to change fielda to what she changed it to, he would not have changed fieldb at all or to something different, but since brian could not see jane's change to fielda, he made the wrong choice.'