Nils Gustav Stråbø (10/7/2010)
You won't believe how many people that actually use NOLOCK or READ_UNCOMMITTED to "fix" concurrency and locking problems. One of our vendors use NOLOCK in every(!) SELECT statement in a system we have purchased from them. They have never bothered to explain the reason for doing it, but my guess, after doing some investigation, is that it is caused by two things:- Lots of missing indexes, which results in excessive scans
- Bad programming, because when I save data in the front-end, SQL Profiler showed that before the transaction for the update statement was committed, another connection from my pc was opened trying to read the updated row(s).
I worked as a consultant on a system for a major health insurance company and they had the nolock hint on every single query in their system. Keeping in mind that this is the system that pays disbursements both from "paper" claims and real time debit cards our balances were always out of whack because we would authorize payment when there was not enough money due to dirty reads. I can't tell you how many times I suggested that they should find better ways of dealing of locked tables. :w00t:
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