1. Do use oracle "Bind variable", it can increase the speed by 90 percent in 10g release1.
2. Understand how to use "lock", read never block write, vice verse.
3. There is a side effect from oracle regarding to the "lock", if you do want to control the access to one row at a specify time (like doing an if 'this row belong to some search condition' then 'modify this row' action), you have to write some logic yourself, for example use the "for update" statement, like: "select * from x where x.id = 1 for update", so that you can lock the row only with id equals to '1' and then modify this row, so that some orther concurrence requests should execute the same sql first, yes, with the same 'for update' statement, and because you already have locked this row(id = 1), orther requests cannot get the access to it, and you get the access control to this row.
4. Regardint to item 3, it will not decrease the concurrence level, because first you only lock the item with id equals to 1 and there maybe thousands of items in your table, second, it will not block the read request.