Multiple Row Locking

Thanks in advance to anyone who could help me out with this issue.

I am trying to lock multiple rows of data in a single table without having to lock the entire table. If we have a table that has a column sales_group. There may be thousands of entries in the table but only 50 or 100 that have the sales group value of 2. Is there a way to lock all the rows of the table where sales_group = 2 without locking the entire table?

I am trying to make this table scalable, so if the number of sales groups reaches 10,000 each with 100 entries it would be wasteful to lock the whole table when I only want to restrict access to the 100 entries within the same sales group.

is it possible to :

lock table Inventory_Sold where sales_group = 2;

Of course I have tried this statement and it does not work. I was hoping someone out there could lend me some insight on how to solve this problem.

Again:
Thanks in Advance

Steve Raftery
Webvision.com Received on Tue Jun 10 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT