How do you lock your web app data?

[Franz GEIGER]

Hi all,

I began to play around with cgi scripts and of course use Python for that.
And man, it is a pleasure to do that with Python! It really is a snap. After
about a day I had written an Issue Tracker, where People can add software
feature requests and bug reports. At this time I add functionality to edit
and delete the entries - until now they only could have been added.

So  an important issue enters the game: How do I lock others out, when one
edits/writes records? Please get me right: This will not be a heavy load app
nor will it be to handle requests and reports from hundreds of people.
Therefore and because I just settled out to explore cgi I decided to use
text files and pickle files for maintaining data and state, which is very
convenient.

Of course I could take a database as backend but I wonder if there are other
possibilities to achieve that "serialization"? How do you do it? Do you
always use a database? Is it worth the effort doing it without a database?

The server is an NT box running IIS4. Python is of version 2.0 (AvtiveState
distribution).

Any hint is appreciated.

Thanks in advance and best regards
Franz GEIGER