Can I Select and Update at the same time?

Question

This is an over-simplified explanation of what I\'m working on.
I have a table with status column. Multiple instances of the application will pull the contents of the f

Answer 1

You should do three things here:

1. Lock the row you're working on
2. Make sure that this and only this row is locked
3. Do not wait for the locked records: skip the the next ones instead.

To do this, you just issue this:

SELECT  TOP 1 *
FROM    mytable (ROWLOCK, UPDLOCK, READPAST)
WHERE   status = 'NEW'
ORDER BY
        date

UPDATE  …

within a transaction.