Kendra Little describes a bug that she encountered in discussions with a reader:
My first thought was that perhaps there is some process that runs against the production system and the test system that goes to sleep with an open transaction, holding an X or an IX lock against this table. If the index create can’t get its shared lock, then it could be part of a blocking chain.
So I asked first if the index create was the head of the blocking chain, or if it was perhaps blocked by something else. The answer came back that no, the index create was NOT blocked. It was holding the shared lock for a long time.
My new friend even sent a screenshot of the index create running against the test instance in sp_WhoIsActive with blocking_session_id null.
Read on for the full story and keep those systems patched.