The Lock Escalation Threshold – Part 1

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.

The Ultimate Connection Summarizer and Trouble Finder

Reports summaries, in 3 levels of detail, connections, running requests, open transactions + cursors, and blocking. Provides query text + plan for the piggiest running request of each group.

Blocking

Using Indexes to Bypass Locks

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?

TopBlocker

Script to log top blocker processes in a database. Top blocker is defined as the process that is at the top of a blocking chain.

usp_KillConnections

Drop all connections from a specific database.

Who's Blocking

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 […]

What's Running

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.  […]

Table Variables

In this article I will try to justify why Table variables are superior to temporary tables.

Script to output dbcc inputbuffer adding spid info

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 […]