There is a pretty good description of the extend/aside mode here (in python, but it should be easily transferable) http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/252494
You will still have the problem with one writer and simultaneous readers though.
metaserver controls this by utilizing a metakit proxy that marshals all read/view/write operations through a central server. In practice it has been really fast although it does have a problem with transactions and rollbacks are kind of meaningless since any data no commited by any user will be rolled back. It is in python only though, Jean-Claude and I are working on a standaridized mkrpc but this is a little ways off. Again the prototype is in python.
We are working on methods around this, in many ways the extend/aside mode is a good start except that it needs to be extended to support not just one aside file but many aside files (one for each user) but this becomes tricky when you consider the need for table locking or row locking so users don't clobber each other's data.
So in short, multiple readers can access the data using extend/aside but you will have to marshall all data changes through the writer. In practice, this works very well for me because my frequency of data committing is small compared to the number of reads.
I hope this helps.
Brian Kelley
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