What bugs me about PEAR is that I can't do mysql_insert_id () out of the box (yeah, I know, another MySQL-specific thing) but beyond that, I really like the idea of using an abstraction layer.

We are developing a VB6 application that uses MySQL as it's database. The tables are InnoDB. How do we check to see if a record/table is locked before we do a SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE ...