title: Exclusive table (read) lock on Oracle 10g?
body: <p>Is there a way to exclusively lock a table for reading in Oracle (10g) ? I am not very familiar with Oracle, so I asked the DBA and he said it's impossible to lock a table for reading in Oracle?</p>
  
  <p>I am actually looking for something like the SQL Server (TABLOCKX HOLDLOCK) hints.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>:</p>
  
  <p>In response to some of the answers: the reason I need to lock a table for reading is to implement a queue that can be read by multiple clients, but it should be impossible for 2 clients to read the same record. So what actually happens is:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Lock table</li>
  <li>Read next item in queue</li>
  <li>Remove item from the queue</li>
  <li>Remove table lock</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Maybe there's another way of doing this (more efficiently)?</p>