single threading access to a table. how?

greets.

i have this problem, cant figure solution. a table X serves as a data store for procedure Y. the goal is to have a number of processes transferring the transactions stored in table X to procedure Y, however the following plsqlish code fragment has the opportunity of submitting the same record <n> times, where n is the number of processes. i would like to be able to do something like a sybase "read lock" on the table. (never thought that would be useful!)

  declare c1 cursor for
    select record from X where status = 'R' for update;

  while <true> loop
   open c1;
   fetch c1 into :Xr;
   Y(Xr);
   delete X where current of c1;
   close c1;
   commit;
  end loop;

 any solutions ??

barry

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