When working in a single-user environment, your application doesn’t encounter conflicting requests for resources. Because only one user is concurrently accessing data, you can reasonably assume that the needed data will always be exclusively available. However, after you move into a multiuser environment, the only reasonable assumption is that conflicts will occur among users accessing data. Microsoft Jet manages these conflicts through the locking services it provides to the application. By locking data, your application ensures that only one user can access it at a given time.