Optimized Locking in SQL Server 2025

Learn about Optimized Locking in the latest versions of SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

SQL ART: Who's Blocking Who? Visualising SQL Server Blocking With Spatial Geometry

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 […]

Reduce SQL Server Blocking with READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT

This article explores how enabling READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT on your SQL Server database might ease excessive blocking.

Understanding Locking, Data Modification and Committing Data in SQL Server

Learn about how SQL Server uses locks when modifying data and how data is committed to a database after data changes.

Lock Scenarios Using sys.dm_tran_locks

Learn about the impact of locking and blocking in sessions through some demonstrations of different types of actions.

Dealing with High Concurrency with Table Hints

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.

Executing Process Details

Script identifies running processes, blocking, waits, and duration

Figure out the Blocking issue

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.

Blocking Chain (SQL Spackle)

Problems with blocking processes can be easy to identify with SQL Server DMV's.

New Custom Metric: Percentage of blocked connections

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.