Postgres and other RDBMSes support SELECT FOR SHARE and
SELECT FOR UPDATE, which allow you to lock a row or set of
rows in a table with a lock.
FOR SHARE locks a row for reads in shared mode, so
other sessions can read the rows, but cannot modify them until the
current transaction commits. As well, if the rows were updated by a
different transaction, then FOR SHARE waits until the other
transactions have committed before comitting.
FOR UPDATE locks a row for writes in exclusive mode,
so other transactions are blocked from reading or updating the rows, or
doing SELECT FOR SHARE or
SELECT FOR UPDATE.
These can be enhanced with NOWAIT and
SKIP LOCKED.
NOWAIT means that any rows with a
SELECT FOR SHARE or SELECT FOR UPDATE never
wait for any locked rows and returns an error if a requested row is
locked.
SKIP LOCKED never waits to acquire a locked row, and
simply continues on without the locked rows.