ajroney brought up an intersting sub-topic.

If 2 users request the same record at the same time in the application and make different changes to the same field the person...

I have often used UNION to display data in a recordset that isn't actually THERE to populate a select listbox - such as SELECT NULL,'Please Select From List' UNION SELECT...

At my last place of employment we were an 'Oracle house' - and simply used the built-in oracle Function TRANSLATE to store passwords. This wasn't for any real encryption...