Blocking Is Not Bad

When dealing with SQL Server databases we have to deal with locking, and blocking within our application databases.  All to often we talk about blocking as being a bad thing.  How ever in reality blocking isn’t a bad thing.  The SQL Server uses blocking to ensure that only one person is accessing some part of the database at a time.  Specifically blocking is used to ensure that when someone is writing data that no one else can read that specific data.

While this presents as a royal pain in that users queries run slower than expected, the reality is that we don’t want users accessing incorrect data, and we don’t want to allow two users to change the same bit of data. Because of this we have locking, which then leads to blocking within the database.

All of this is done to ensure that data integrity is maintained while the users are using the application so that they can ensure that the data within the database is accurate and correct.

Without locking and blocking we wouldn’t have data that we could trust.

Denny

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