In the old days of DOS I could do that with Clipper 5.2. Two or more PCs using Netbios shared directories could work on the same database, provided that they wouldn't write to the same record. That wasn't a problem because the environment (can't recall for sure if it was Clipper or an external library) allowed single record locking, so I enclosed the lock attempt into a timed spinlock-like block which attempted once per second for 10 or 15 seconds before obtaining the lock or failing with a record busy error. No SQL involved however, and indexes had to be rebuilt by hand like twice a day to be safe. But those were the days when a 486 could crunch a 100.000 records db with multiple indexes very easily.