How to lock a single row
MySQL uses only table-level locking from MyISAM tables. If you can, switch to InnoDB for row-level locking.
Here's a link to the MySQL site describing Locks set by SQL Statements for InnoDB tables.http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-locks-set.html
Kind of late, but hope it will help someone:
UPDATE user SET lastusedecnumber = LAST_INSERT_ID(lastusedecnumber + 1);SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID();Will give you atomic increment of lastusedecnumber and ability to read new value of lastusedecnumber field (after increment) using SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID().
As a workaround you could add a column to your table, like locked TINYINT(1) - whenever you want the row to be locked you set it to 1. When you now try to access this row, the first thing you do is check if the locked fields is set.
To unlock the row, simply set it to 0 again. Not nice but a really simple workaround.