Excluding Access to DB?

[Volte6]

So, What i'm doing right now is storing an object in the database.

I want to be able to pull that object up, deserialize it, modify it, serialize it, and store it. This could happen frequently, and many users might need to access this object.

With that in mind, I of course don't want multiple people accessing it, changing it, and storing it... it would have completely unexpected or at least conflicting results.

What is the standard method of avoid this? Is there a way to 'lock' the table row in mysql until I'm done with it? Is there a convential method to this?

And finally, what is the usual method of dealing with accessing this 'locked' row? Loop until it is unlocked?

Anything else I should consider? Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

[Krait]

See http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/LOCK_TABLES.html

[Volte6]

I was thinking something more like:

while (!rowLock($rowID))   // Try and lock loop
{
     // Stall
}

// Make changes to row

unLockRow($rowID);

I guess I could just make a int field that stores a timestamp, and as part of the rowLock() function I could update that stamp to 5 minutes in the future, and only allow locking of rows that are less than the current timestamp. unLockRow() would change that int to 0 (zero). That seems like so many unnecessary queries though.