Poll Worker
I ran a Twitter poll recently, because as I was writing another blog post, I wasn’t quite sure how to group uncommitted/nolock between pessimistic or optimistic isolation levels.
read uncommitted is what kind of isolation level:
— Erik Darling Data (@erikdarlingdata) December 1, 2021
On the one hand, locking and blocking does still come into play with them. anyone who has seen locking on schema stability can attest to that. On the other hand, they will read just about anything you want. That’s sort of optimistic in spirit, but maybe not in letter.
Most of you kind folks out there called it optimistic, though some others had more colorful language to describe it:
indeterminate
— Kendra Little (@Kendra_Little) December 1, 2021
opportunistic
— L_ N___ (@sqL_handLe) December 1, 2021
Filthy.
— CujoDeSoque (@cujodesoque) December 2, 2021
Problematic
— Martin Madsen (@mraaskov) December 1, 2021
Probabilistic. Maybe
— Dèjì Akọ́mọláfẹ́ – Disambiguate This (@Dejify) December 1, 2021
Sadistic
— 🅹🅰🅼🅴🆂 🅲🅾🅾🅺 (@Cookie_JAC) December 1, 2021
Option 3: terrible
— Randolph “taking time off” West (they/them) (@_randolph_west) December 1, 2021
At the end of the day, it’s probably not the right isolation to use, no matter what you choose to call it.
Thanks for reading!
Going Further
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about: these days I have AI do the annoying stuff for me. My new video course teaches you to work the same way, and I teach whole teams in a one-day workshop. Someone still has to know enough SQL Server to keep the robots in check, and that’s what my training is for.