On Jul 26, 2006, at 9:01 PM, David Binger wrote:

>> In practice, I am only interested in what someone else is doing if
>> I have
>> already read the data and I now want to commit a change.
>
> That seems reasonable.

Looking at this today, I think I should add that
MVCC, as I understand it, will provide what you
are asking for here, but that may not help the application
you are describing if it continues to require rapid
writes to the same instance.  Those rapid writes may cause
conflicts anyway.  With MVCC, you avoid the immediate ReadConflict,
but you will get a conflict later if you try to commit anything
before you call abort.