I think what you need to research is the topic of concurrency. One way to implement this is to have a Modify Date on the primary record. 1) Read the table entry along with the modify date/time. 2) When updating the database, compare the original date/time with the value currently stored, if the date/time has not been changed, then it is OK to perform your update. (Rollback) During your update you would set the modify date/time to the current date/time. (GetDate() ) Something like that.