Lock and Connection Management

Technical Article

The Lock Escalation Threshold – Part 1

  • Article

This article isn’t about the act of lock escalation itself, which is already well documented and generally well understood. Some myths (like row locks escalating to page locks) persist, but challenging those yet again probably wouldn’t change much.

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2022-09-19

External Article

Using Indexes to Bypass Locks

  • Article

One of the issues you'll face with SQL Server is blocking which is caused by other processes that are holding locks on objects. Until the locks are removed on an object the next process will wait before proceeding. This is a common process that runs within SQL Server to ensure data integrity, but depending on how transactions are run this can cause some issues. Are there ways to get around blocking by using different indexes to cover the queries that may be running?

2008-05-02

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Technical Article

Who's Blocking

  • Script

A quick little standalone script that tells you what process is blocking and what processes the blocking processing actually blocking.When running this script in QA, change your output to "Results in Text" ( CTRL-T ).  Utilizes the blocking info in sp_who2 combined with dbcc inputbuffer and a little cursor to wrap it all up.  Formatting […]

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2007-04-19 (first published: )

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Technical Article

What's Running

  • Script

spWhatsRunning does just that.  It tells you exactly what is executing on your server.  By combining the output of the sp_who and dbcc inputbuffer, this script will tell you exactly whats being executed.  DBCC INPUTBUFFER will tell you the same thing, but by the time you get the spid, the offending process may be gone.  […]

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2007-04-17 (first published: )

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Technical Article

Script to output dbcc inputbuffer adding spid info

  • Script

The following script will allow the user to get information from all spids that have a program name associated with them. That is event info out of dbcc inputbuffer. Additional columns may be added and used in the table through simple modifications of the script. I just found it useful for troubleshooting and setting up […]

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2006-10-19 (first published: )

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Using CHOOSE()

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Question of the Day

Using CHOOSE()

We have this code that sets some status values and then queries them using the CHOOSE() function in SQL Server 2025.

CREATE TABLE Status
(
    StatusID INT,
    StatusDescription VARCHAR(20)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.Status
(
    StatusID,
    StatusDescription
)
VALUES
(0, 'Uncategorized'),
(1, 'Active'),
(2, 'Inactive'),
(3, 'Temp');

GO
SELECT CHOOSE(StatusID, 'Unknown', 'Active', 'Inactive', 'Temporary')
FROM Status;
When the SELECT runs, what is returned?

See possible answers