Taking SQL art from shamrocks and Easter eggs to something your DBA manager might actually care about. If you've been following my SQL spatial art series — shamrocks, Easter eggs, Christmas trees — you'll know I have a habit of finding increasingly creative misuses for SQL Server's geometry data type. Most of them have been […]
2026-06-12
4,559 reads
This article explores how enabling READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT on your SQL Server database might ease excessive blocking.
2024-08-19
Learn about how SQL Server uses locks when modifying data and how data is committed to a database after data changes.
2023-10-23
Learn about the impact of locking and blocking in sessions through some demonstrations of different types of actions.
2020-06-11
8,305 reads
Systems with a large number of requests on a critical database table are prone to blocking and slowness. We take a look at getting things done using T-SQL table hints.
2017-06-20
3,663 reads
2015-08-10 (first published: 2015-07-16)
1,566 reads
This script will help you to get the culprit along with IP address and User name which helps us to determine the Blocking root cause.
2015-10-14 (first published: 2013-12-08)
4,422 reads
Problems with blocking processes can be easy to identify with SQL Server DMV's.
2013-09-19
7,339 reads
This metric reports the number of connections that are currently blocked, divided by the total count of current connections.
Most well-balanced SQL Servers will have some degree of blocking. This metric attempts to measure the impact of lead blocking queries against other queries. Higher values indicate that many connections are being blocked, and queries should be tuned to reduce the amount of contention.
2013-06-07
3,144 reads
In this tip, Basit Farooq shares a query written using dynamic management views (DMVs) that will help you to quickly identify SPIDs and other useful information about the processes that are causing blocking on a SQL Server instance.
2013-05-01
6,231 reads
By Brian Kelley
I developed these rules a while back, before COVID. I had a period of...
By Steve Jones
Someone asked why I would use TRY_PARSE after I posted a question at SQL...
My mugI grew up surrounded by coffee farms in Guatemala and somehow spent most...
I have a table that ends in ON [PRIMARY] TEXTIMAGE_ON [PRIMARY]. I'm about to...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item OUTER APPLY Fundamentals: Part 2
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building Great Software
I have this data in the OrderHeader table in a SQL Server 2025 database (ordered by CustomerID ASC):
orderid orderdate customerid complete 3 2025-05-10 00:00:00.0002 1 21 2024-01-10 00:00:00.0003 1 15 2023-10-28 00:00:00.0004 1 13 2025-03-08 00:00:00.0006 1 11 2024-04-02 00:00:00.0007 1If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT * from dbo.OrderHeader where customerid between 3 and '6'See possible answers