1) If it is the best way to start or it is better to use ADORDD
We recommend using FWH adofuncs.
You can directly work with ADO without any of these functions, but using adofuncs makes your life very easy.
3) If there is a need to do maintenance on compaction, reindexing
No need for SQLEXPRESS, MSSQL, ORACLE, etc.
Well, you need to do it if you are using MSACCESS and adofuncs have function to do this.
2) How to run an Rlock or Flock to prevent two users from working
on the same record or groups of records.
We can open a table with optimistic locking or pessimistic locking. Mostly tables are opened with optimistic locking and there is no need to locking.
If we open a table with pessimistic locking, we can use record locks.
We advise you to unlearn DBF programming habits and record locking is not desirable or practiced normally.
Anyway, it is upto you.