SQL Server Contention Diagnosing and Resolving Blocking Problems

As we develop SQL Server applications with more and more concurrent users, there is inevitable contention as users compete for data resources. They are either forced to wait for each other or face the risk of reading inconsistent data due to in-progress changes.

This trade-off between correctness and throughput is critical, and can have a major impact on SQL Server performance. This paper discusses the diagnosis and resolution of SQL Server blocking problems.