Category: Locks, Blocks, and Deadlocks

Erik Darling looks at the kinds of locks taken when updating an indexed view:

So what causes Range Locks? Just ask Sunil. He knows everything (this assumes the serializable isolation level):

Equality Predicate

If the key value exists, then the range lock is only taken if the index is non-unique. In the non-unique index case, the ‘range’ lock is taken on the requested key and on the ‘next’ key.

If the ‘next’ key does not exist, then a range lock is taken on the ‘infinity’ value. If the index is unique then a regular S lock on the key.

If the key does not exist, then the ‘range’ lock is taken on the ‘next’ key both for unique and non-unique index.

If the ‘next’ key does not exist, then a range lock is taken on the ‘infinity’ value.

Range Predicate (key between the two values)

‘range lock on all the key values in the range when using ‘between’

‘range’ lock on the ‘next’ key that is outside the range. This is true both for unique and non-unique indexes. This is to ensure that no row can be inserted between the requested key and the one after that. If the ‘next’ key does not exist, then a range lock is taken on the ‘infinity’ value.

Erik has an interesting example and lets us see a potential concurrency problem with multi-table indexed views.

Aaron Bertrand shows off new functionality in SQL Sentry and SentryOne Plan Explorer around deadlock visualization:

There’s a lot going on there, but much of it is noise. There is a whole bunch of contention on the table SqlPerf.Session — session 342 is trying to perform an update, but it is stuck waiting on shared locks taken by two services. Now, let’s check the Optimize Layout box above, and look at the circular graph again. Simplified, right?

This checkbox is easily the most powerful option to discard noise and help you focus on the crux of the deadlock issue. In the original graph, you can see that many of the elements presented are simply innocent bystanders — waiters that are captured as part of the deadlock activity, but in no way contributing to it. We can detect this in a lot of cases and so, when you check the box, we hide them from view, allowing you to focus much more directly on the key players involved in the deadlock. There is no question that eliminating the noise can really speed up troubleshooting; with those extra nodes removed, I can clearly see that I have some kind of order-of-operations issue on the SqlPerf.Session table, between the transfer service and the processor service.

Very cool.

Arun Sirpal shows that the TRUNCATE command needs to take locks like any other data modification command:

The truncate option is fast and efficient but did you know that it takes a certain lock where you could actually be blocked?

What am I talking about? When you issue a truncate it takes a Sch-M lock and it uses this when it is moving the allocation units to the deferred drop queue. So if it takes this lock and you look at the locking compatibility matrix below you will see what can cause a conflict (C).

Arun includes an image which shows what can block what, and also shows us an example.

Dmitri Korotkevitch announces a new tool:

Troubleshooting of the blocking and concurrency issues is, in the nutshells, a simple process. You need to identify the processes involved in blocking conditions or deadlocks and analyze why those processes acquire the locks on the same resources. In majority of cases, you need to analyze queries and their execution plans identifying possible inefficiencies that led to excessive number of locks being acquired.

Collecting this information is not a trivial task. The information is exposed through DMVs (you can download the set of scripts here); however, it requires you to run the queries at time when blocking occurred. Fortunately, SQL Server allows you to capture blocking and deadlock conditions with the blocked process report and deadlock graph, analyzing them later.

There is the caveat though. Neither blocked process report nor deadlock graph provide you execution plans of the statements. Nor do they always include affected statements in the plain text. You may need to query plan cache and other DMVs to get this information and longer you wait lesser is the chance that the information is available. Moreover, SQL Server may generate enormous number of blocked process reports in cases of prolonged blocking and complex blocking chains, which complicates the analysis.

Confirmed to work with SQL Server 2012 and later, but might work on earlier versions as well.  Dmitri has released it to the public, so check it out.

Guy Glantser explains the process around updating data in SQL Server, particularly the benefit of having update locks:

In order to update a row, SQL Server first needs to find that row, and only then it can perform the update. So every UPDATE operation is actually split into two phases – first read, and then write. During the read phase, the resource is locked for read, and then it is converted to a lock for write. This is better than just locking for write all the way from the beginning, because during the read phase, other sessions might also need to read the resource, and there is no reason to block them until we start the write phase. We already know that the SHARED lock is used for read operations (phase 1), and that the EXCLUSIVE lock is used for write operations (phase 2). So what is the UPDATE lock used for?

If we used a SHARED lock for the duration of the read phase, then we might run into a deadlock when multiple sessions run the same UPDATE statement concurrently.

Read on for more details.