At 05/08/2002 03:54 PM (Wednesday), Martijn Tonies wrote:

>We once created a system that updated only the modified column in this way:
>
>update mytable set changecol1 = newvalue1, changecol2 = newvalue2
>where idcolumn = idvalue and changecol1 = oldvalue1 and changecol2 =
>oldvalue2
>
>If the update returned '0 rows affected' we would know there was a 'lock'
>error.
>
>Worked great.

Now you're talking my language!

Lots of variations on this available. (Some built-in to standard Delphi
components such as BDE's UpdateWhereAll.)