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Queues and Watermarks

Forrest McDaniel wants a zippier queue in SQL Server:

I recently had the pleasure of investigating a procedure that pulled from a queue. Normally it was fast, but occasionally runtime would spike. The spooky thing was the query was using an ordered index scan that should only read one row, but during the spikes it was reading thousands.

Surely there’s a rational explanation…

Spoilers: there was. And Forrest a’int afraid of no ghosts.

(sotto voce – I’m so glad that Forrest didn’t sneak in any Ghostbusters references so that I could do that here and be original.)